You can thank BuzzFeed’s Andrew Kaczynski for the front-page thumbnail. In all seriousness, this is a “gamechanger” in the literal sense of that term. Axelrod and his pals are playing a breathtakingly stupid game with the “dog wars” and this anecdote will in fact change voters’ perceptions if/when it enters wider media circulation. Romney 2012: Because “dog” plus “water” does not equal “stew.”

Oh, almost forgot. He and his sons saved a bunch of people too during this same incident.

“We heard a whole bunch of screaming,” said Josh Romney, who immediately hopped onto his Jet Ski. “We tore out of there and my dad hopped on the other Jet Ski and came out right after us.”

Roughly 300 yards out onto the lake, six adult family members and their dog were floundering in the water, after their boat suddenly sprung a huge leak — sinking in less than 90 seconds, Josh said…

In the middle of the rescue, the governor actually took a dunking himself — thrown off the Jet Ski as one anxious boater scrambled aboard and tipped the craft off-balance.

The rescuing Romneys also managed to snatch the family dog, McKenzie, from a watery grave — grabbing the Scottish terrier first because it was the only passenger without a lifejacket.

“It looked like it wasn’t going to last much longer,” said Josh, who held the waterlogged pooch on the ride back to shore.

Hat tip to AEI’s Lazar Berman for rescuing that story from obscurity. Speaking of which, why exactly is it obscure? Why hasn’t the Romney camp done more to circulate it? I recall reading about it once before but it’s so far off the radar that it slipped my memory altogether. It’d be nice to have it firmly planted in readers’ minds in time for Gail Collins’s 8,000th column about Romney putting Seamus on the car roof.