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West Virginia Governor Jim Justice hadn’t finished the first sentence of his remarks at the Republican National Convention on Tuesday when the crowd at the FiServ forum drowned him out by chanting a single word, over and over again.
“Babydog, Babydog, Babydog.”
The attendees at the GOP’s confab was demanding the presence of an unlikely political icon, Justice’s ubiquitous English bulldog.
Justice, who’d anticipated the clamor for his four-legged friend, calmed the crowd by telling them that he knew they wanted to meet his “little buddy” and called for an aide to bring Babydog to meet her adoring public.
Babydog waddled onto the stage to a loud ovation before taking her place on a large leather chair next to Justice, who is currently the frontrunner in the race to succeed retiring Mountaineer State senator Joe Manchin.
“She makes us smile, and she loves everybody,” Justice said as he returned to remarks in which he largely called for Donald Trump to be re-elected to the presidency and described the ex-president as “an incredible man” who “genuinely cares about all of us.”
Although Babydog did not utter a single word during Justice’s time on stage, the governor claimed she had a prediction about the outcome of the November general election.
“Babydog says we’ll retain the house, the majority in the House, we’re going to flip the Senate, and overwhelmingly, we’re going to elect Donald J Trump and JD Vance in November,” he said.
The four-year-old canine first rose to public attention when Justice made her the centerpiece of a campaign to convince West Virginians to accept the Covid-19 vaccine. She became a ubiquitous presence at his news conferences, and even made an appearance during one of Justice’s addresses to the state legislature in which he dared actresss Bette Midler to kiss the canine’s posterior after Midler criticized state residents as “poor, illiterate and strung out.”
