AMERICA:MITT ROMNEY, who is likely to be the Republican presidential nominee, is hounded by the memory of Seamus the Irish setter.
My friend Orla reminded me of the story when I was in New Hampshire this week. It was history, I thought, underestimating the doggedness of US reporters.
Rachel Maddow devoted a long segment of her Thursday-night show on MSNBC to Seamus. The Dogs Against Romney website, founded in 2007, has been revived and is hawking T-shirts stamped with paw prints and the slogans “Mitt is mean!” and “Never Forget Crate Gate”. The subject is again being addressed by serious newspapers.
The incident occurred in 1983, and was first reported by the Boston Globein June 2007, when Romney made an earlier bid for the presidency.
As recounted by the Globe, Romney, his wife and five sons set out in their Chevy station wagon on a 12-hour holiday journey to Ontario, Canada. Romney placed the family pet, Seamus, in a dog carrier, which he strapped to the roof of the car.
The eldest son, Tagg, watched out the rear window, “where he glimpsed the first sign of trouble. ‘Dad!’ he yelled. ‘Gross!’ A brown liquid was dripping down the back window, payback from an Irish setter who’d been riding on the roof in the wind for hours.
“As the rest of the boys joined in the howls of disgust, Romney coolly pulled off the highway and into a service station,” the Globe report continued. “There, he borrowed a hose, washed down Seamus and the car, then hopped back on to the highway. It was a tiny preview of a trait he would grow famous for in business: emotion-free crisis management.”
Romney’s detractors have created a “Google bomb”, a method of redefining a name and pushing it to the top of Google searches. If you enter “spreading Romney”, the first thing that pops up is: “(rom-ney) v. 1. to defecate in terror”.
In August 2007, Fox News presenter Chris Wallace asked Romney how he could do such a thing. “This is a completely airtight kennel and mounted on the top of our car,” Romney said. “Love my dog. We’ve had a lot of dogs over the years. Love them. Seamus, as his name is, climbed up there all by himself, enjoyed his ride . . . it was a good ride.”
Wallace failed to ask the obvious follow-up question: why Romney put Seamus back on the roof after the dog’s distress became apparent.
New York Timescolumnist Gail Collins has retold the Seamus story more than 30 times in five years, and the Wall Street Journalrecently asked Romney to rebut Collins's insinuations. "Uh . . . Love my dog," Romney replied. "That's all I've got for ya."
The Journalinsisted. "Oh please," Romney said as an aide hustled him away. "I've had a lot of dogs and love them and care for them very deeply."
Neil Swidey, the journalist at the Globe who wrote the 2007 story, returned to the topic for the first time this week, in an article titled “What our fascination with Mitt Romney’s dog Seamus says about our culture”.
Swidey doesn’t want voters to base their choice on Romney’s treatment of his dog, but he says the incident provides an insight into his character: “He functions on logic, not emotion.”
America’s fascination with the story is due in part to the fact that Romney is the product “of two of the most mysterious and least understood subcultures in the country: the Mormon church and private equity finance”, Swidey adds. Bill Wasik, an editor of Wired magazine and the author of the 2009 book And Then There’s This: How Stories Live and Die in Viral Culture, predicts that Barack Obama supporters will use Seamus’s story if Romney is confirmed as the Republican nominee, the implication being that Romney will “sort of tie us all to the roof of the car”.
Newt Gingrich is gaining on Romney in South Carolina, where the next primary will take place a week from today. In its new For the Dogs video, the Gingrich campaign catalogues 10 Romney gaffes.
In addition to Seamus, there’s Romney’s apparently false claim that “I saw my father march with Martin Luther King”, his employment of illegal immigrants, his callous statement that the government must “let the housing crisis run its course”, and the $10,000 (€7,900) bet to which he challenged Rick Perry. Romney, whose fortune is estimated at $250 million, has clumsily tried to identify with the struggling middle class and the unemployed – when he wasn’t saying how much he enjoyed firing people.
Watching the Youtube clips, I recalled Gary Harrington (70), a reluctant Gingrich supporter whom I interviewed on the eve of the New Hampshire primary.
“The presidents we elected in the past could never be elected now,” he said. “We go over them with a fine toothcomb.”
