The Week

• Perhaps the Secret Service picked up some bad habits protecting John Edwards back in 2004.

• For months, the Obama campaign and its media militia harped on the story that Mitt Romney once put the family dog Seamus in a carrier atop the station wagon for a vacation road trip. New York Times columnist Gail Collins mentioned Seamus in every Romney-related column, and David Axelrod recently tweeted a photo of Obama and Bo riding together in a presidential limo: “How loving owners transport their dogs.” Then Jim Treacher of the website the Daily Caller posted this paragraph from Dreams from My Father, Obama’s first memoir, recalling his Indonesian childhood: “With Lolo [his stepfather] . . . I was introduced to dog meat (tough), snake meat (tougher), and roasted grasshopper (crunchy).” Dreams was written as a postmodern account of racial displacement and resolution, but by 2008 it had become the gospel of Barack Multiculti: born in Hawaii, raised in Indonesia, schooled at Harvard and the Chicago projects, searching for his Kenyan roots . . . The dog treats were a detail of his multifaceted worldliness. How times have changed. The Romney campaign leapt on it: A senior adviser re-tweeted Axelrod’s unctuous tableau with the tag, “In hindsight, a chilling photo.” The blogosphere sprayed one-liners like shrapnel: How does Obama get Bo to roll over? With a rotisserie. Congrats to Romney and Right/Net jokesters for counterpunching. And condolences to the president, who ran as the savior of the world, but has found, after three years–plus of funk and failure, that all his attitudes and empty rhetoric are coming back to bite him.