Dogging Mitt Romney

Confession: I’m not much of a dog person. Certainly, I appreciate them a great deal in theory. But in person, they make me nervous. Perhaps as a result, I was slow to appreciate that the saga of Seamus — as in, the story of how Mitt Romney, in the early eighties, drove to Canada with his crated Irish Setter on the top of his car — was more than an easy way to give Romney a hard time. But there do seem to be dog owners for whom Seamus’s tale suggests that Romney is unfit to be president of the United States. For the Atlantic, I report from the Dogs Against Romney protest outside the Westminster dog show at Madison Square Garden.

(Let it not be said that I am anti-pet, though. I am, after all, co-owner of the world’s cutest cat.)