dog that caught the car

English

Alternative forms

• the proverbial dog that caught the car

Etymology

From dogs' instinctual urge to chase cars, most of which are traveling far and fast enough that they are never within reach.

Noun

dog that caught the car (plural dogs that caught the car)

1. (idiomatic, colloquial, especially politics) A person who has unexpectedly attained an aspirational goal and is now unsure what to do with it.
   • 1987, Dale Bumpers, “Commission on the Bicentennial of the United States Constitution”, in Senate Hearings before the Committee on Appropriations, 99-1027, Pr. 2, p. 634:

     So I went out, and I was telling the President about what a tough time being Governor was. I felt like the dog that caught the car; I really wasn't equipped to be governor... When I got ready to leave, I realized that I had bored a guy who had to make the decision to drop the bomb, telling him what a tough job being the governor of Arkansas was.

   • 2002 May 15, Don Randall, "Workplace Relations Amendment (Prohibition of Compulsory Union Fees) Bill 2002: Second Reading", Parliamentary Debates: House of Representatives (Official Hansard), p. 2235:

     Mr Reynolds, you might be interested, who seems to be one of the six who run the Labor Party in Western Australia, says this about Mr Kobelke: 'As I have said before Mr Kobelke and the government are like a dog that caught the car—they didn't know what to do about it when they caught it.'"

   • 2018 February 27, Dave Holmes, "Sean Hannity's Favorite Piece of Trump-Era Art Is Terrifying", Esquire:

     It captures the face of a dog that's caught the car.

   • 2022 February 25, Chris Grey, "The Dogs that Caught the Car", Brexit & Beyond:

     Since its use on the very day after the referendum, it has become a cliché to say that Brexiters are like ‘the dog that caught the car’, achieving something they had never expected and then did not know what to do with. That was obvious from the very first hours after the 2016 vote, when Johnson and Gove appeared on TV looking both shocked and scared.

   • 2022 May 10, Alex Shephard, "With Roe, the GOP Is the Dog that Caught the Car", The New Republic:

     In this sense, the GOP are the proverbial dog that caught the car. For decades, they have been working their voters into frothing hysteria over the need to protect the unborn from abortionists and their Democratic protectors. But what this means in practice... is far less appealing. From a public health standpoint, the draft decision leaked on Monday is an abomination. From a political standpoint, it imperils midterm victories that were for all intents and purposes inevitable.

Hyponyms

• See Thesaurus:idiot

See also

• bite off more than one can chew