Claim: The Obamas had their dog, Bo, flown on his own airplane to join them on vacation in Maine.
Example:[Collected via e-mail, July 2010]
Is it true that the Obamas' dog, Bo, flies on his own plane when they take him with them?
Origins: In 1944, President Franklin D. Roosevelt was dogged by a false rumor that he had accidentally left his Scottish terrier, Fala, behind during a trip to the Aleutian Islands and had ordered a U.S. Navy destroyer to the islands to retrieve his pooch at a cost of millions of dollars to U.S. taxpayers. In a famous speech, Roosevelt deftly used humor to puncture his political opponents and deflate the rumor, saying:
You know Fala is Scotch, and being a Scotty, as soon as he learned that the Republican fiction writers, in Congress and out, had concocted a story that I'd left him behind on an Aleutian island and had sent a destroyer back to find him, at a cost to the taxpayers of two or three or eight or twenty million dollars, his Scotch soul was furious ... He has not been the same dog since.
In July 2010, a similar rumor attached to another Democratic president, Barack Obama, when an unfounded claim was circulated stating that the Obamas' family pup, a Portuguese water dog named Bo, had been flown out to Maine on his own plane so he could be on hand to greet the First Family when they arrived in that state for a weekend vacation.
This rumor was based on a single sentence in a Waterville, Maine, newspaper article about the Obamas' visit, which was misinterpreted to mean that Bo had flown on a plane accompanied only by a single handler:
Arriving in a small jet before the Obamas was the first dog, Bo, a Portuguese water dog given as a present by the late U.S. Sen Ted Kennedy, D-Mass.; and the president's personal aide Reggie Love, who chatted with [Gov. John] Baldacci.
Bo flew to Maine in a different plane than the rest of the First Family not because he was part of a special canine-only flight, but because the local airport (Hancock County-Bar Harbor Airport in Trenton, Maine) was too small to accommodate the Boeing 747-200B in which the President usually travels. Therefore, the Obamas flew to Maine in a Gulfstream GIII/G3 jet (which seats six to nineteen passengers), while Bo was loaded onto an earlier flight which carried a contingent of presidential aides and staff members.
The Waterville Morning Sentinel later added an amplification to its original article about the Obamas' visit, noting that:
Today's story about the arrival of the Obamas said the Obama's dog and one aide arrived on a small jet before the First Family, but there were other occupants on the plane, including several other staffers. The presidential party took two small jets to the Hancock County-Bar Harbor Airport in Trenton because the airport was too small to accommodate the president's usual jet.
Last updated: 18 July 2010
The URL for this page is http://www.snopes.com/politics/obama/bo.asp
