Romney dogged by old dog story

As the focus on Mitt Romney grows tighter, there's one story that just may be his undoing.

No, it's not something he did as a corporate raider, or a flip-flop from when he was governor of Massachusetts, it's a story about his dog.

Though it has been well-reported in the past, it turned up on the Internet with a fury yesterday, and has some now doubting his Presidential abilities.

It happened in 1983 when Romney took his family on a road trip from Massachusetts to Ontario, Canada, where his parents had a summer home on Lake Huron. They also took the family dog - an Irish Setter named Seamus.

Seamus didn't travel with Romney, his wife and his five sons in the station wagon. Rather Romney put a dog carrier and special windshield on the roof, put Seamus in the carrier and made the 12-hour trip.

When asked about it recently by Chris Wallace on Fox News, Romney said the dog loved it up there.

His sons, according to the Boston Globe that reported the story in 2007, had a different response. First, Tagg, Romney's oldest, yelled yelled, "Dad - gross!" Brown liquid was dripping down the back window.

Seamus had diarrhea.

What did Romney do? "As the rest of the boys joined in the howls of disgust," the Globe reported, "Romney coolly pulled off the highway and into a service station. There he borrowed a hose, washed down Seamus and the car, then hopped back onto the highway. It was a tiny preview of a trait he would grow famous for in business: emotion-free crisis management."

Now the story is coming back to haunt him on the campaign trail. According to the Wall Street Journal on Saturday, "Mitt Romney is being dogged by an old story: that on a family vacation from Boston to Canada decades ago, he put the family pooch in a carrier strapped to the station wagon roof.

"As the public streamed into a GOP candidates' forum at the College of Charleston, two protesters held "Dogs Against Romney" signs as they stood by an SUV with a giant stuffed puppy flopped on a crate on the roof."

Former Clinton aide Lanny Davis wrote an opinion piece on the Fox News website to fault Romney, writing that the story is "spreading again on the Internet and disturbs me the more I learn about it."

"And I am betting the more it gets out, the more votes Romney loses - red, blue and purple.

"When, in a campaign debate, Romney opposed allowing a non-documented worker who has lived here for 25 years to stay and earn his way to citizenship, he struck me as heartless.

"But when I read the story recently in greater detail about what Romney did to his Irish Setter, Seamus, that struck me as more than heartless - it struck me as downright cruel."

He concluded with the following paragraphs:

"This is the ultimate Purple Issue - it cuts across Republicans, Democrats, blue states, red states, liberals and conservatives.

"There are more than 78 million Americans who own one or more dogs - about two out of every five households. A Google search of 'Romney Dog on Car Roof' brought me 1,080,000 results.

"I don't know how many of these 78 million dog owners (and thus, dog lovers) have yet heard or read about Romney doing this horrible thing, much less making his disingenuous claim that Seamus loved the experience on top of a speeding car for 12 hours, while his bowels turned to water.

"But I'm thinking if this story gets out and stays out, there will be tens of millions of Google hits by next October. And I am also thinking that Romney is going to lose a lot of dog-lover votes on this issue alone, regardless of party or ideology.

"Here's one dog lover's opinion - mine:

"I think anyone who puts his dog in a cage on top of a car for a 12-hour drive and then deludes himself or tries to delude others that the dog really enjoyed it - to me, with all due respect, I feel such a man shouldn't be president of the United States."

One place that a web search for 'Romney Dog on Car Roof' is a website dedicated to the incident: Dogs Against Romney. Visit it to read the complete Boston Globe story.