The politics of puppies
just act normal, people.
There’s a scene in the 2012 movie The Campaign where Will Ferrell plays a congressman running against a half-witted but good-hearted political upstart. And in a (very accurate) cut, he goes around telling every group of potential voters that they “are this nation’s backbone.”
It’s a funny bit because, yeah, political theater is really like that. The first rule of retail politics is that you’ve got to make your audience feel like you think they’re important. Like you really value their vote. And there are only so many ways to do that. Give them a pin, shake their hand, kiss their baby and tell them they “are this nation’s backbone.”
If you’re dumb enough to try to break in as a political reporter and you go around listening to a lot of political stump speeches and writing about them, you hear the same kind of wooden lines like this. It’s a standard bit. Another standard bit is the humanizing line. Politicians usually do this by mentioning their spouses (‘my wife just loves the peaches ya’ll grow here’) or their pets.
And by pets, I mean dogs. This is not a cat country. Cats are for America’s artists: Taylor Swift and Ernest Hemingway. America’s politicians have dogs. You’d never vote for a freak with a bird, would you?
Dogs are big business in politics. Capitol Hill is overrun with them. 1 When a member of Congress gets a new puppy, it’s an event. Top-of-the-gossip-chain within the congressional press corps. A staffer is assigned to parade the puppy through the hallways like a roman triumph. The puppy is feted, photographed and posted to Twitter.
Everybody loves puppies. And so it should go without saying, but if you’re a politician, you should never ever, ever, ever, ever say you once shot a puppy. So it was a bit stunning this week when some outlet reported that South Carolina Governor Kristi Noem did a bit in her memoir about shooting her puppy that was “less than worthless as a hunting dog.”
And not just that, Noem capped the anecdote with the line, “I guess if I were a good politician, I wouldn’t tell the story here.” 2
Your first reaction to Kristi Noem shooting her dog is probably outrage. Or maybe something closer to disgust. But, then through another lense, it’s almost funny. Think about it, Kristi Noem did not write her own memoir. A ghostwriter did. Some poor schmuck who churns these things out like toilet paper off the roll.
So that ghostwriter deliberately put the dog-killing incident in the book and then they wrote that jab about Noem not being a good politician. Incredible shade here.
I’ve heard that Noem put the dog-killing vignette in the book because she’s trying to land the Trump VP spot — and Trump famously hates dogs. But still, that’s a hell of a play to make. Because even Donald Trump — a man who regularly voices his resentment of wind — is smart enough to keep his hatred of dogs to himself.
So, the question that plagues the political junkies: does this become the thing that defines Kristi Noem? Even more so than her in-broad-daylight affair?
There’s a thing that can happen in politics where one story comes to define the entire character of a politician. It doesn’t necessarily even matter if the story is true, you can — like LBJ famously did — call your opponent a pig-fucker just to “make the son-of-a-bitch deny it.” This happens all the time. And it seems to happen more frequently in the social media age.
Who can forget Christine O’Donnell, the lady with a campaign that nose-dived after she cut an ad in which she denied being a witch. In fact, you probably don’t know a single other thing about Christine O’Donnell other than the fact that she’s not a witch. But this is common. Amy Klobuchar was the candidate who ate a salad with a comb. Ron DeSantis was the candidate who eats pudding with his fingers. That last rumor was fueled, at least in part, by a pro-Trump coalition.
Speaking of DeSantis, he also got in on the puppy discourse this week in an incredible tweet urging for puppy adoption. The Florida governor posted a video of himself with a puppy under the caption: “Essentia is a lab/shepherd mix who was rescued from the southern border, where the border crisis affects everyone—even our canine friends. Please consider giving Essentia a great home by adopting her from Big Dog Ranch Rescue.”
It’s an insane tweet because:
A.) DeSantis isn’t running for president anymore, he’s back to being the governor of Florida (a non-border state) again. So why is he still banging on about the border?
B.) that video taken is at the governor’s mansion in Florida — did Ron DeSantis really fly a dog from Texas to Florida to have it adopted in Florida? At that point, why wouldn’t you just keep the dog? Like how hollow is your soul?
C.) is he really blaming immigrants for stray puppies? Who is the flak that came up with that bend-over-backwards spin? This press person, they work for the governor — they’ve got to be smoother than that. At the very minimum, the flak-in-question should have figured out that there’s only one real menace to puppies: a certain midwestern Republican governor.
The best dog I ever heard of on Capitol Hill was this giant Bernese Mountain Dog who was afraid of the shiny floors of the Capitol hallways and had to be carried around like a 140-pound baby between the elevator and the office where his owner represented some state from the Pacific Northwest. It was an incredible sight.
Also, this is a bizarre and hilarious misrepresentation of the “if I were a good politician” line. The good politician line goes something like this: “if I were a good politician, I’d have a full-time bookkeeper” — the line is supposed to make you more relatable by separating you from the good/career politicians and put you on the side of the voter. You drop a cooked line like “if I were a good politician, I’d spend every single weekend out there raising money, instead of with my son — which I do.” But you don’t say, “if I were a good politician, I wouldn’t tell you that I used to be a juggalo.”