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By Root 802 0

American politics today, one would do well to consider the fate of Mitt Romney’s late dog. An affable Irish setter, Seamus by all accounts was a beautiful creature, a loyal son of a bitch, and a friend even to cats—a picture of him obtained by the Boston Globe showed two white kittens rooting, no doubt disappointedly, in his underfur. Our future historians, however, will remember Seamus Romney from his short and surprising cameo during the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign, in which his master, the former governor of Massachusetts, was a well-funded but ill-fated participant. Seamus’s posthumous star turn began on June 27, 2007, when the Globe, in the fourth part of a seven-part series about the humanoid Romney, related an anecdote about a car trip from Boston to Lake Huron, Canada, in 1983. Romney had arrived at a novel solution for Seamus’s transport, namely, the affixing of a dog carrier to the roof rack of the family station wagon. After the dog, under duress en route, unleashed a stream of diarrhea down the wagon’s windows, the future governor “coolly pulled off the highway and into a service station,” recounted the Globe. “There, he borrowed a hose, washed down Seamus and the car, then hopped back onto the highway.”

Within days of this revelation, Seamus Romney had transcended doghood to achieve an ephemeral media godhood. Time, the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, the Associated Press, the Cox News Service, and even the British Guardian all weighed in on him that same week. But the real fire under the story was lit online, fanned by a wide network of political bloggers who, at more than sixteen months until Election Day, were already obsessively covering the campaign. Care was paid to link Seamus’s treatment to the failings of the current administration. “Mitt Romney will be a great Commander-in-Chief of Abu Ghraib,” quipped the Washington blog Wonkette. “Mitt Romney—Compassionate Conservative?” asked the blog Divine Democrat. “Ask Seamus.” Others gleefully calculated candidate Romney’s decline: “Stick a Fork in Mitt Romney; He’s Done,” crowed Sandra Younger in San Diego.

Defenders were few, and chimed in somewhat gingerly. “Sometimes the roof is the safest place,” noted right-leaning blog The Voice of Treason. Meanwhile, parodists quickly created a blog called Dogs Against Romney, sporting pictures of scared pups and their fervent testimonials. During those two weeks in the summer of 2007, one would have been forgiven for believing, pace Sandra Younger, that this anecdote from a road trip twenty-four years beforehand would cause the entire candidacy of Mitt Romney to jump a guardrail, tumble down a ditch, and burst into flames.

Yet looking back on the Seamus Romney story today, what is most striking is its forgettability, how indistinguishable it seems in retrospect from the idiots’ parade of meaningless stories that came to define the campaign. In July 2008, on his daily “First Read” blog, MSNBC’s Chuck Todd memorably dubbed it the “A.D.D. Election,” as he ran down the nanostories that had flickered through the political consciousness in just one week (I have added some clarifications in italics):

Phil Gramm’s “mental” comments [the McCain adviser had claimed the economic recession was only “mental”], Jesse Jackson’s “nut”-ty remarks [the African American leader had said he wanted to “cut (Obama’s) nuts out”], Iran’s missile tests (and that McCain “killing them” joke), FISA [the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which Obama had backed over liberal objections], Clinton donors not happy with Obama’s debt relief efforts (and Obama briefly forgetting to mention the former rival at a joint funder), that McCain bio spot invoking the culture wars of the 1960s, the scrutiny of the candidates’ economic plans, more courting Latinos, Webb off the veep list, Carly Fiorina’s Viagra/birth control comment, the T. Boone Pickens energy ad launch, the RNC energy ad and the first Obama response of the general election, and, of course, we started the week with Obama announcing he was moving the last night of the Dem convention