The Dog Days of the Presidential Campaign Begin

Loading

I doubt there are many Republicans or conservatives who are genuinely outraged or bothered by young Barack Obama eating dog meat during his years in Indonesia.

But the tale of Mitt Romney putting the carrier of his family dog, Seamus, on the roof of his car has become liberals’ favorite knocks on the all-but-certain GOP nominee. The Washington Post recently summarized:

It happened more than a quarter century ago, at the start of a Romney family summer vacation. But the tale of Seamus, the Irish setter who got sick while riding 12 hours on the roof of Mitt Romney’s faux-wood-paneled station wagon, is ballooning into a narrative of epic proportions.

It has come to characterize the candidate — and not in the favorable way Tagg Romney hoped for when he first talked in 2007 about his family’s annual road trips.

Late-night host David Letterman has been giving the dog near-nightly shout-outs. There are parody Web videos, “Dogs Aren’t Luggage” T-shirts and Facebook groups. (“Dogs Against Romney,” which protested outside last month’s Westminster dog show, has more than 38,000 Facebook fans.) The New Yorker featured a cartoon, with Rick Santorum riding in Romney’s rooftop dog carrier, on its cover last week. In the five years since the story was revealed, New York Times columnist Gail Collins has mentioned Seamus in at least 50 columns.

One cannot help but suspect that liberals repeat the tale, hoping to villainize Romney in the eyes of dog owners and low-information voters. This morning the Huffington Post features a story entitled “Why Seamus Matters” that ominously declares:

Romney’s treatment of Seamus is potentially damaging to his candidacy because it reinforces much of what many Americans, particularly swing voters, already feel about Romney-that he is a smart enough man, but simply unable to connect or relate to the problems and challenges facing ordinary Americans.

Okay, fine. If this election is going to be about what each candidate has done to a dog, let’s let it be about what each candidate has done to a dog.

What I suspect is that this partially reflects the political professional class looking at the low-information voter and wondering what, if anything, will stick. Surely, even those who know almost nothing about politics and don’t care will at least pay attention to a story about a dog, right?

Doug Schoen, writing in Newsweek about a survey he conducted on Americans’ civic knowledge:

But government and history? Basic knowledge of the Constitution, the three branches, the wars we’ve fought? Fewer than one third of those questions were answered correctly.

In the same way, a schism emerged about who knew what. Republicans did better than Democrats, with two thirds of Republicans passing vs. only 53 percent of Democrats. But liberals (64 percent) did better than conservatives (62 percent).

Parsing those numbers further, what we see is engagement at each party’s base. A solid 70 percent of conservative Republicans passed, followed by 61 percent of GOP moderates and 55 percent of GOP liberals. For Democrats, it was the opposite: liberals and moderates proved better informed, with 62 percent of both groups passing, but just 36 percent of conservative Democrats did so. In other words, conservative Democrats pulled down the numbers for both their ideology and their party, while the centers of both parties were the least engaged.

This illustrates something quite dangerous. The operative theory about America’s political situation holds that the fringe of each party is poorly informed, and the middle possesses the wisdom, but our numbers show it’s actually the extremes that are engaged — and thus, up on their facts — while the middle is relatively ill informed.

The respective base of each side is locked up. What remains is those folks in the middle who claim to care but who can’t be bothered to read about politics and policy. So what ends up influencing the decisions of these low-information voters? All kinds of factors, including appearances . . .

Read more

0 0 votes
Article Rating
Subscribe
Notify of
1 Comment
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments

Well, at least Romney’s dog experience left the dog alive!

The Left is defending Obama for eating dog meat on the grounds that his stepfather–who was Indonesian–wanted to share his culture and customs with him.

But there’s just one problem with this: it wasn’t his culture or custom.

Dog meat is and was illegal in Indonesia’s capital, Jakarta when Obama was a kid growing up there.

One must use the black market (same as getting tiger meat) to obtain dog flesh to eat.
I think Obama was all-in on gaining powers from eating snake and other weird and rare and ILLEGAL meats.
Anyway, it was in Obama’s ”autobiography,” so it probably wasn’t even true ever!