--- title: Who Let the Dogs Out? description: Wading through the nontroversies of Campaign 2012 canonical: https://time.com/archive/6596124/who-let-the-dogs-out/ author: James Poniewozik article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2012-05-07T04:00:00.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-02-25T06:22:00.652Z article:section: Politics og:title: Who Let the Dogs Out? og:description: Wading through the nontroversies of Campaign 2012 og:url: https://time.com/archive/6596124/who-let-the-dogs-out/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltde093bcdab65f2d0/6988d9b9bc6cfc69913e2a3c/time-logo.jpg?branch=production og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 675 og:image:alt: TIME og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Who Let the Dogs Out? twitter:description: Wading through the nontroversies of Campaign 2012 twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltde093bcdab65f2d0/6988d9b9bc6cfc69913e2a3c/time-logo.jpg?branch=production --- * [Politics](/section/politics/) # Who Let the Dogs Out? > Sponsored content. 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Brief is TIME's Washington newsletter, written by senior correspondent Philip Elliott. It explains the politics, personalities and power dynamics behind the headlines, three times a week. It reaches 85,000 subscribers with a 37.0% open rate as of August 2026. #### Where can I get analysis of Washington politics by email? D.C. Brief is TIME's free Washington politics newsletter, available at time.com/newsletters. It is written by a TIME senior correspondent who covers the capital full time. #### Who writes TIME's D.C. Brief? Philip Elliott, a senior correspondent at TIME, writes D.C. Brief. #### Is D.C. Brief free? Yes. D.C. Brief is free at time.com/newsletters. by [James Poniewozik](https://time.com/author/james-poniewozik/) May 7, 2012 4:00 AM UTC by [James Poniewozik](https://time.com/author/james-poniewozik/) May 7, 2012 4:00 AM UTC If you follow politics, you’ve heard that this presidential election is the most important since 1980, or 1932, or 1860\. And it’s easy to see why. Just look at the issues we’ve debated in the past few weeks. Mitt Romney strapped his dog to the roof of his car almost 30 years ago. Barack Obama ate dog in Indonesia over 40 years ago. Somebody who supports Obama said something mean about Romney’s wife. The guy who sang “Cat Scratch Fever” said something mean about Obama. Romney refused to eat a locally baked cookie at a photo op, assuming it had come from a “7-Eleven bakery.” Hillary Clinton drank a beer in Colombia. Someone called Romney an Etch A Sketch. Political news has become full of these trumped-up, social-media- and cable-news-fanned brouhahas over quotes, anecdotes and associations. We’re coming off a decade of war and financial ruin, yet our politics have gone from Israeli settlements to Irish setters, from 9/11 to 7-Eleven. This is the year of the nontroversy. Let’s start with the dogs. On a drive from Boston to Canada in 1983, Romney put his dog Seamus into a carrier on his family car’s roof rack, the drive interrupted when the roof-riding pooch had an attack of diarrhea. The Boston Globe reported the anecdote in 2007, and through two election cycles, Seamus’ trip became the most recounted Massachusetts ride since Paul Revere’s. Obama campaign adviser David Axelrod tweeted a picture of Obama with his dog Bo in the presidential limo, saying this was “how loving owners transport their dogs.” On April 17, the conservative website Daily Caller barked back, quoting a passage from Obama’s memoir Dreams from My Father recalling his childhood in Indonesia, where he lived from ages 6 to 10 and was exposed to local delicacies, including snake, grasshopper–and dog. Soon the Romney campaign was razzing the President and supporters were trending the hashtag #ObamaDogRecipes on Twitter, and within a day it was national news. Now, the fact that each side can raise a nontroversy does not make the two equal. You could argue that it is not as bad for a child to eat food given to him as for a grown man to put an animal on top of a car or that said animal would much rather be roof luggage than dinner. But either way, you are judging two presidential candidates’ merits by their records on dogs. Nontroversies were not invented in 2012 (see: Al Gore, earth tones; see also: Sarah Palin, vice-presidential candidacy of). But social-media outlets such as Twitter and Facebook have greased the path from blip to blog post to headline, helping campaigns paint opponents as alien, callous or out of touch–or just change the subject and win the news cycle. Thus a weeks-long policy debate over Republicans’ stances on women and health care was countered with the Romney camp’s studiously outraged nontroversy over a Democratic strategist’s saying stay-at-home mom Ann Romney “never worked a day in her life.” Which in turn was rejoined by Obamaists’ counter-nontroversial demand that Romney denounce rocker Ted Nugent for urging an NRA crowd to “chop \[Democrats’\] heads off in November.” These nontroversies make it into the news with assists from the campaigns, which now battle each other with Internet memes the way they do with TV ads. But they also offer political reporters and cable-news bookers a more come-hither topic than offshore corporate tax rates. If the stories push people’s buttons, so the rationalization goes, they must resonate with larger concerns. As with many nontroversies, there’s a tiny grain of truth in that. Yes, anecdotes and gaffes can tell you something about a candidate, but not nearly as much as what they’ve done–or say they will do–as actual elected leaders. Yes, associations can be telling, but if we judge presidential hopefuls by their loudmouthed idiot supporters, that will pretty much rule out everyone. And yes, there’s room in political news for offbeat stories. But when these kinds of flaps increasingly become the news itself rather than a sidebar, the tail–to use a political clich that will never sound the same again–is wagging the dog. ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"NewsArticle","@id":"https://time.com/archive/6596124/who-let-the-dogs-out/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/archive/6596124/who-let-the-dogs-out/"},"headline":"Who Let the Dogs Out?","datePublished":"2012-05-07T04:00:00.000Z","dateModified":"2026-02-25T06:22:00.652Z","description":"Wading through the nontroversies of Campaign 2012","url":"https://time.com/archive/6596124/who-let-the-dogs-out/","keywords":[],"thumbnailUrl":"","author":[{"@type":"Person","name":"James Poniewozik","url":"https://time.com/author/james-poniewozik/"}],"articleSection":"Politics","image":[],"publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Time","url":"https://time.com/","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://time.com/images/logo.png","width":528,"height":156},"foundingDate":"March 3, 1923","sameAs":["https://www.facebook.com/time","https://www.instagram.com/time/?hl=en","https://twitter.com/time","https://www.pinterest.com/timemagazine"]}},{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"item":{"@id":"/section/politics/","name":"Politics"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"item":{"@id":"https://time.com/archive/6596124/who-let-the-dogs-out/","name":"Who Let the Dogs Out?"}}]}] ```