CNN often ends up calling me when they can’t think of anyone else in Washington to discuss a random topic, so this month’s random topic ended up being presidential pets. Now it’s actually a pretty fun subject—presidents have had a wide-ranging menagerie in the White House, from parrots to alligators to horses—but it was still one of the more silly interviews I’ve done, but given the political winds this year and the controversies over Mitt Romney’s dog not an entirely trivial one. An excerpt from the piece:
It would be easy to dismiss all of this as political silliness were it not for one troubling fact: Sometimes the way a president connects with critters can affect the way voters relate to him.
“Presidents and their pets have a long and storied history,” says Garrett Graff, a goldfish owner and editor-in-chief at Washingtonian magazine. His theory about why voters take such an interest in such matters: “Most of us don’t ‘get’ Middle East oil politics, and the rise and fall of the G.D.P., but we can ‘get’ if you connect with a dog or you connect with a cat.”
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