Bo Obama becoming social media star

Dogs have played a high-profile role in the presidential election for the first few months of 2012, and President Obama’s campaign is keeping family dog Bo front and center with campaign ads, official merchandise and social media.

The Obama family’s love of pet Bo is well-known, to the point that first lady Michelle Obama described him as “my son” to David Letterman last month. Bo also appears on magnets — “I bark for Barack!” — and buttons for sale by the official campaign store.

The campaign posts pictures of Bo — making public appearances or from White House videos — on the official Tumblr blog, and also runs a “Pet Lovers for Obama” page on Facebook and a similar board on Pinterest, where the campaign interacts with supporters by sharing submitted photos of other pets wearing Obama-themed gear. Pet photos tend to be very popular on both social media platforms, gaining hundreds of “likes” on Facebook and “re-pins” on Pinterest, both marks of digital success.

The Washington Post also pointed out this week that an Obama ad with Bo and the text “Join Pet Lovers for Obama” has popped up on the Internet. In April, Bo headlined a campaign fundraising effort in honor of his own third anniversary. The family has owned Bo, a Portuguese Water Dog, since 2009.

Bo’s profile has grown even as Obama’s reelection campaign heats up, thanks to a persistent story about a 1983 trip taken by presumptive GOP nominee Mitt Romney and his family, when the family dog, Seamus, was reportedly tied to the top of the car in a dog carrier. Romney’s critics have repeated the story in an effort to make the candidate appear insensitive.

The Obama campaign has capitalized on that perception, as well, with Obama campaign adviser David Axelrod explicitly comparing Obama’s treatment of his dog to Romney’s.

In exchange, Obama critics recently extracted a description from Obama's 2007 memoir Dreams From My Father of the various foods — including dog meat, snake meat and roasted grasshopper — that he ate as a child in Indonesia. Romney adviser Eric Fehrnstrom tweaked the president over the dog-eating detail on Twitter, as did many critics on Twitter who launched the hashtag #ObamaDogRecipes and an anonymous Web video that mocked Obama’s relationship with Bo, with the format and music from an American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals ad.

Axelrod last week called it “silly” to bring up something from Obama’s childhood to attack the president.

Romney has said if he could do it all over again, he would rethink the decision to transport his dog on the top of the family car, due to “the attention it's received.”

But Obama turned the story from his youth into a joke last weekend at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, saying, “My stepfather always told me, ‘It’s a boy-eat-dog world out there.’ ”

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