Hillary’s dirty laundry by Stefan Beck

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Oct 22, 2007 01:16 AM

Hillary’s dirty laundry

by Stefan Beck

I don’t like Hillary Clinton. I’d be upset if she won the presidency—maybe not enough to make empty threats about emigrating to the land of maple syrup, but certainly close. So I was surprised to find my heart going out to her as I learned that she’s soon to be “swiftboated” by fundamentalist “cat ladies.” The London Times notes, “As the â€˜first pet’ of the Clinton era, Socks, the White House cat, allowed â€˜chilly’ Hillary Clinton to show a caring, maternal side as well as bringing joy to her daughter Chelsea. So where is Socks today?” The answer sure isn’t going to help Hillary’s campaign:

Once the presidency was over, there was no room for Socks any more. After years of loyal service at the White House, the black and white cat was dumped on Betty Currie, Bill Clinton’s personal secretary, who also had an embarrassing clean-up role in the saga of his relationship with the intern Monica Lewinsky.

Some believe the abandoned pet could now come between Hillary Clinton and her ambition to return to the White House as America’s first woman president. . . .

Clinton’s treatment of Socks cuts to the heart of the questions about her candidacy. Is she too cold and calculating to win the presidency? Or does it signify political invincibility by showing she is willing to deploy every weapon to get what she wants?

“In the annals of human evil, off-loading a pet is nowhere near the top of the list,” writes Caitlin Flanagan in the current issue of The Atlantic magazine. “But neither is it dead last, and it is especially galling when said pet has been deployed for years as an all-purpose character reference.”

If anything, this “off-loading” humanizes Hillary: No truly cold and calculating politician would make such an egregious blunder in an age when Ellen DeGeneres can cry her eyes out on TV because a pet adoption agency took away someone else’s puppy. When I was in Greece this summer, an otherwise perfectly sane American girl was moved to tears by the way Greeks treat diseased and aggressive stray dogs. She even considered moving there, a country where the urban homeless make these guys look like dandies from some futuristic welfare state, to start an animal charity.

In other words, there’s plenty to criticize about Hillary Clinton, but the case of the missing Socks might end up saying a lot less about her than it does about the disoriented priorities of some of our electorate.