This got lost a bit in all the news from Capitol Hill, so in case you’re not caught up, it seems that Commander, the president’s handsome German shepherd, has been serially attacking Secret Service agents for a while now. In the latest biting incident, on Sept. 25, an agent required medical attention. (This after Biden’s other dog, Major, was sent to live in Delaware after displaying similarly irascible tendencies.)
Now, before I make a larger point about this, let me stipulate that I am the owner of an impossibly sweet pit bull mix who, while never having hurt anything larger than a cicada, has an unfortunate habit of snarling and lunging at smaller breeds and petrifying their owners. So I know what it is to love a misunderstood dog.
Let me also say that I’ve always found President Biden to be a deeply compassionate person (the polar opposite of his predecessor), and I’m sure this extends to his pets. I can understand completely why he’d be reluctant to banish a dog who’s clearly rattled by the singularly strange circumstances of life in the White House.
All that said, if Commander were your dog or mine, and he had a habit of clamping down on police or mail carriers, how many attacks do you suppose it would have taken before the dog was removed from our custody? Two, maybe three? The answer is definitely not 11.
And what do you think would happen to our dog then? Would he be sent to one of our various other homes to live out his days chasing defenseless squirrels? No. In most places, after multiple “biting incidents,” he’d probably be euthanized. You’d have to make up some story for the kids about a farm where all the dogs frolic and Taylor Swift comes to visit.
Just so we’re clear, I’m not remotely suggesting this is what should happen to Commander, who seems like a well-loved and otherwise delightful dog. I’m saying that’s what would happen if he belonged to someone else.
Not so if you’re the president, though. The terse and jargony White House statement disclosing this latest attack — we learned in July about the others only after Judicial Watch obtained emails through the Freedom of Information Act — made no mention of a plan to relocate Commander. (I guess the Secret Service is just going to have to toughen up when it comes to being mauled.)
At this point, I can hear the president’s defenders screaming: So what? Republicans just tried to wreck the country (again)! They’re about the renominate an autocrat who wants to see the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff executed! Only a falsely equivocating, democracy-hating moron could waste time picking on Biden’s dog!
Fair enough. But here’s why I think you’re wrong.
There’s a familiar sense of entitlement in this Commander business. New presidents often — always, if you don’t count Donald Trump — come into office talking about the people’s house and what a privilege it is to live there, about how much they appreciate federal workers and how transparent they intend to be.
But then they settle in, and something happens. After a few years of being waited on every minute of the day, they start to see themselves as inseparable from the job. They begin to see the house as their house, rather than ours. They see the agents that protect them as furniture. They see news organizations as intrusive and tell us only what they figure we’ll find out anyway. (To my mind, Barack Obama was generally an exception to this pattern.)
No one around the president wants to tell him that he’s no longer holding himself to the standards of other people. So the aides enable, instead. They implement new “leashing protocols” (they actually use this term), instead of saying flatly to the president: “This is crazy, and it has to stop.”
And this is the mind-set that so often undoes a presidency — especially in its second term, should Biden be lucky enough to earn one. (And it will take some luck.) Presidents become mired in avoidable controversies when they begin to think everyone else is there to serve them, rather than the other way around.
That’s never been Joe Biden, and I don’t think it is now. But his aides shouldn’t dismiss the Commander fiasco as just another “dog bites man (and woman)” story. They should see it for the warning flare that it is.
A president in our house, on our dime, ought to live by the same rules as the rest of us. And if Biden can’t see why it’s wrong to put his own protectors at risk, no matter how painful the alternative might be, then somebody needs to work up the courage to tell him.
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