What’s remarkable about the incidents of the dog at the White House is how the same set of facts, with a different political figure, might have led to an entirely different sort of coverage, and perhaps to a story that didn’t just pop up and then disappear during a summer news cycle.
Consider: The most powerful family in the country appeared to sit by as their dog repeatedly menaced scores of anonymous people who work for them. The dog lives in the executive mansion, with all the custodial staff who come with it. He has access to all sorts of training regimens, and, presumably, to doors with pet-proof latches. And yet a frightened secret service agent had to wield a chair like a lion-tamer to protect against yet another bite.
If Commander had belonged to, say, Nancy Reagan, the Marie Antoinette narrative would have written itself: Look at that entitled elitist, smiling for the cameras while her dog terrorizes the help!
But the Bidens have spent decades establishing a reputation as middle-class normal people, not out-of-touch elites. They’re not plutocrats like the Trumps or intellectuals like the Obamas or aristocrats like the Bushes, all of whom might have been more seriously singed by a news cycle involving their ill-behaved dog attacking employees who then have to worry about the correct way to file injury paperwork. To see the strength of this narrative, just peruse the reporting on biter-gate.
It’s not that the stuff got no media attention. Like everything that happens at the White House, it got coverage. For the most part, though, the tone has been more along the lines of “bad dog!” than “bad person!” There have been calls to celebrity dog trainers and more than one pun about Commander being sent to the doghouse.
Maybe that’s as it should be. Anyone who’s had an ill-behaved dog can relate to the mixed emotions in this kind of moment: On the one hand, you love your pooch. On the other, you’re cringing at the harm it caused. Perhaps inability to control a beloved pet is yet another bit of Biden’s everyman schtick. Or perhaps one benefit of a career spent perfecting a regular-folks persona is that people don’t jump to the most damning interpretation of what happened.
What’s illustrative, though, is that even the conservative media, which did the work of ferreting out the bite records and appears determined to promote a damning interpretation of what happened, has also avoided the most obvious storyline: That all of this represents some awfully insensitive behavior by the first family.
Instead, in a statement that accompanied its release of the FOIA trove, Judicial Watch cited the paper trail as an example of “corruption,” and vaguely accused the Secret Service leadership of deep-state complicity by trying to hide the evidence. An earlier New York Post story made reference to Chris Whipple’s recent book about the Biden White House, in which the president allegedly said he didn’t trust a Secret Service agent’s dog-bite claim and viewed the agency as full of MAGAs.
If you’re out to malign Biden, that convoluted conspiracy-theory stuff is an awfully long walk for a glass of water.
Having a dog that bites the staff isn’t corrupt. What it may well be is inconsiderate and entitled and irresponsible. That’s not the stuff of impeachment, but it’s kinda lousy all the same. Yet even Biden foes can’t quite paint it that way.
Like another surreal story of this summer — Biden’s apparent refusal to acknowledge his seventh grandchild, an out-of-wedlock daughter of Hunter Biden — it’s a case where the power of a long-established reputation (Joe Biden, family man) runs into facts suggesting the contrary. It took a sharply condemnatory Maureen Dowd column before the White House announced that Biden did indeed recognize the granddaughter, Navy Joan Roberts. The acknowledgment came late on a summer Friday afternoon. Biden’s reputation as a man devoted to family remains strong.