Character Analysis
Andrew Jackson was the name of the dog that Jim Smiley had. To anyone but Smiley, it looked like Andrew wasn’t worth much. However, it turned out he always won dog fights. Andrew Jackson won all his dog fights except for one. His technique was to grab onto the other dog’s hind leg and then just hold on until the other dog gave up. He had persistence. But when he ended up fighting a dog that had no hind legs due to an accident, and he didn’t know what to do, so he gave up. When the fight was over, he limped off and died.
His name, of course, reminds us of the seventh American president of the same name. Before becoming president, Jackson was a lawyer who practiced in the frontier (the "West"), a gambler, and an advocate of democracy for all the states. He had the reputation for being a scrappy populist, the kind of politician who fights for "the little guy."