Why Romney Will Lose to Obama: The Mutt Romney Issue
[ Click above to embiggen: one of the reasons Romney will lose to Obama ]
I’ve written about this one before, but I’ve only recently started seeing the Tolerant Left use the term “Mutt Romney” to begin incorporating the incident with Romney’s dog Seamus in the 80s into the larger meme that Romney is callous, cruel, and uncaring.
If Romney is the Republican nominee, expect to be saturated with three nonstop visuals for the five months of the general election campaign:
1. Thurston Howell III/Monopoly Mr. Moneybags cartoons
2. Mormon “magic underwear” (as the Tolerant Left will call the sacred Latter Day Saints garment)
3. Romney’s dog Seamus experiencing explosive, terrified diarrhea on the top of a car
Here in Boystown, no doubt Halloween costume this year will involve a lot of vulgar “magic underwear” to mock Mormons and more than a few creative people concocting some sort of chocolate-milk spraying “Mutt Romney” ensemble.
Romney supporters are very quick to screech, “I don’t care! This doesn’t matter!” but the thing is, it will indeed matter to the millions of Independent voters who will be scared off voting for Romney because the story of him strapping his Irish setter to the roof of his car and terrifying the animal while he drove on the highway will upset a great many people.
Where I live now, our lease won’t let me have a dog but I admit to spending time on YouTube watching funny dog videos whenever possible. I grew up with Siberian huskies and would love nothing more than to have another one to take care of in the future. The thought of strapping a dog to the roof of a car horrifies me — and it doesn’t matter that “some people used to do this” or “Romney built a special windshield for it”. It’s still horrifying. I just can’t imagine anyone I know doing this — and it sure will be hard to vote for Romney in the general election knowing he did this to an animal, no matter how long ago it was. It’s more than off-putting…it’s just downright creepy.
In high school, I remember one of the nuns teaching us about Lyndon Johnson during a history class and she stopped whatever she was saying for a moment and got incredibly angry before interjecting that it was hard for her to teach anything positive about Johnson because she disliked the man so much for picking his dogs up by their ears and slinging them around the White House lawn. Johnson was “just playing with them” and the news media at the time loved it when he’d do this — because no one thought anything was wrong with it, at the time, fifty odd years ago. I’ve seen lots of old-timey photos of people picking rabbits up by their ears too, with everyone smiling as if it was the most normal thing in the world.
When I see photos of Johnson picking his dogs, named “Him” and “Her”, up by their ears I think, “What a sadistic jackass” — which is immediately followed by, “What stupid names for dogs”. Though, at least he didn’t name them Little Bastard Johnson or Lacquer Box Johnson, the way all the humans in his family required “LBJ” as initials so the cheapskate could save money on monogrammed items (which is honestly why he named his daughters — and renamed his wife Claudia — so they’d all be “LBJs” like him).
One of the most common arguments that Romney supporters make when they screech “But he’s most electable!” is that Romney supposedly doesn’t “scare people” in Independent ranks.
I guarantee you that when the Tolerant Left is done saturating the public consciousness with “Mutt Romney” related imagery that plenty of people will be scared off voting for this man — because it’s just so alien and off-putting (if not outright horrifying) to think of someone strapping a live animal (and a family pet no less) up on top of the roof of a car and then barreling down the highway.
When the Tolerant Left recounts this story, I would not be surprised if they left out the part where the dog was in a carrying case…and apocryphally the meme will spread that the dog was just tied naked and exposed to the roof with some sort of twine. This fits in perfectly with the Tolerant Left’s caricature of Romney as cold, callous, and cruel.
It will be a huge issue to a lot of people — because the majority of the public does not read political sites and they vote for candidates because “I like his voice”, “He met my sister once”, “That wife of his is pretty”, and “I never heard nothing bad about him I guess”.
The “Mutt Romney” stuff will impact these people a lot and there is no way to counter it.
Can YOU think of something to effectively make this “Mutt Romney” thing go away once the Tolerant Left revs up the attack machine?
© 2012, Kevin DuJan. All rights reserved.
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No. I've already seen several Photoshopped pics of Mutt with a kennel strapped to his head.
Amazingly enough, there are entire websites dedicated to ridiculing Romney for this. Dogs Against Romney has well over 20,000 likes on FB.
I think the Mutt issue is Moot. I have a great dog, a beautiful German Shepherd….and had many dogs in my lifetime…69 years….and I think given the context of the time this occurred, given wanting to take your dog on vacation, it was something many people would have done. When my son was an infant, we not only didn't have seat belts in our cars, but there were no car seats…today I would be arrested for taking an infant in a car without a car seat. I personally would never put my dog on a plane…yet many do, and that is considered fine…..go figure. To me, it is a silly issue.
And here we have it folks ….the first Romney Campaign Employee posting on this.
Very clever, saying the Mutt/Moot thing.
You people at Romney headquarters should run with that …really.
On the plus side, Kev, you should be flattered that the Romney campaign takes you so seriously and views you as threatening their chance to be able to lose to Obama.
Candy —
One of the things I want to avoid in the upcoming election is jumping to conclusions that someone is a Romney operative troll. I ran NoParty2′s IP address through the search function backstage and see posts dating back to the first week of November last year…and not all of them are about Romney.
I don’t know this person personally, but my gut feeling would be that if it was a Romney operative then that person would not have been doing a great job for Romney since s/he didn’t chime in on 90% of the Romney stuff I run.
I think this is just a person who has the opinion that the “Mutt Romney” thing will not be an issue in the election — and that is a fair opinion to have.
I think the Tolerant Left will really go to town with it because it has all the pieces needed to create a powerful visual that whallops Romney in a race against Obama…there’s a dog involved…there’s a car…there’s diarrhea…it feeds into Romney looking callous…it’s the kind of thing Jay Leno will make jokes about…etc.
Let’s not be too quick to find trolls where there might not be one…and let’s remember that once the nomination is set in stone, the mission will be to drag whomever the GOP candidate is over the finish line to beat Obama.
So, if Romney’s the nominee then it’s going to be like in 2004 when I was a Democrat and I had to go knocking on doors for John Kerry. I remember one woman looked at me, and I looked at her, and she said, “I’m a Democrat so I’ll vote for him, don’t worry, but please tell me something to get excited about him over”. The only thing I could think of to say was that Teresa Heinz would be an interesting First Lady and that she would ensure there was something comical and odd in the news every day if you like that sort of thing.
I still can’t think of a good thing to say about Kerry. I will say that Ann Romney is a lovely woman who seems like one of the kindest and most genuine people ever…and I am holding out hope that the VP on the ticket is someone I can cheer loudly for like Allen West. Mitt Romney is very handsome, so there’s that.
Otherwise, it’s having to campaign door to door to defeat Obama — and it’s surprisingly hard to be AGAINST someone. Campaigning is so much easier if you can be FOR someone you like instead of just trying to stop a person who is bad.
Fair enough Kevin.
I just saw the comment, and looked at the lack of an avatar/gravatar, and assumed the worst….
But you know what they say about assumptions – everyone has one. Or is that opinions?
Nevertheless, I will stop butchering metaphors and get the the meat of Kevin's reply.
You are exactly right in pointing out what the left will do to Romney, creating all sorts of caricatures about him, regardless of whether or not they are true.
You have been illuminating here since I have been reading at really providing a roadmap to folks about how the Left works, and what their strategies are. It just seems as if folks such NoParty2 refuse to see how they operate.
That is not to say that we cannot disagree, or have a difference of opinion as to how effective one line of attack or the other will be. Quite the contrary. I think that if we challenge each other, it prepares us to better defend whomever the candidate/nominee will be.
And as you said, if it is Romney, we will certainly be doing quite a bit of "dragging" them across the finish line as you mentioned.
Part of me wants to hope that Romney is going to be like Chris Christie was in his primary against the blind guy in the NJ Republicans' Primary. Most folks, the WSJ, etc, said that Christie wasn't going to be effective, he wasn't conservative, etc, but then he won the election and he has been (mostly) fantastic, with certain obvious complaints (which we don't have to go into here). While I am not in favor of all of his policies, he has certainly been an unexpected surprise in NJ.
But even as Christie said in that interview on Oprah, (I don't know if he let this slip, or if it was intentional), Christie said the Romney has good ideas, that he just cannot communicate well (as Christie can), that Romney lacks the ability to "connect" with people.
Of course, that does not bode well for any politician, if they cannot connect with people, and of course it is even worse if that politician is the Republican Candidate for President. Which makes me wonder how he has been in politics for so long, except that he has only been elected but once….
So you see, even as I try and give myself something to vote FOR, I end up back where I started. People absolutely need something to vote FOR, rather than vote AGAINST.
I agree about the VP candidate. I was thinking that Rubio would be the choice (and after his FL endorsement I still believe that) but someone like West would be spectacular. But there is no way anyone in that Romney Campaign Room is going to choose anyone as "polarizing" as West. They will choose the "safe" candidate for VP, the one that will help them lose the fastest.
I think about it this way – if Romney had gotten the nomination last time around, do you ever think in a million years, that he would have chosen Sarah Palin as his VP? No freaking way….he would have trotted out another has been, safe, innocuous candidate that wouldn't alienate too many independents.
Which gets me thinking – another take on why Christie came out and endorsed Romney so early ( and I haven't read your column on Ann Coulter yet, I will after this), the reason that I think he did, and maybe this is cynical, is that he KNOWS Romney will lose, which leaves the door wide open for him in 2016, regardless of whether or not he wins in NJ in 2013.
So he pushes the least electable candidate, in hopes that he loses, while at the same time pleasing the "powers that be" in the Cocktail GOP, so that is set up as both an "outsider" candidate, as well as an "it's-his-turn-cocktail-party-gop" candidate.
You know, I just don’t understand why Republicans don’t see Romney’s loss coming…and they don’t understand that Occupy Wall Street was just the beginning of what the Tolerant Left is going to do to decimate him. It’s like Republicans WANT Obama to have a second term because:
1. They don’t want to defeat a black man and be responsible for a race war when Obama loses
2. They don’t want to be holding the White House when the Depression is officially called
3. They know they can’t do anything to fix the problems and so they don’t even want to try
It might be a mix of all these things.
The problem Kevin relates to is definitely going to be a problem. Conservatives tend to only look at the good in life while the Leftists only focus on the horrible…and that is exactly why characterizations not only work but stay around for many, many years. Case in point, Sarah Palin. The demonization will be a large part of the election no matter who the opposition candiate may be. Another case in point is the character assassination by all of the candidates. It sure worked for Romney in Iowa and Florida, didn't it?
Hey, re: the missing tax returns, this article from Newsmax had some interesting tidbits about stocks that he had through 2009. Lots of pharmaceuticals, some investments in China and companies operating in Iran
http://www.newsmax.com/Politics/Romney-investment…
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