{"id":1482,"date":"2007-10-22T05:24:19","date_gmt":"2007-10-22T10:24:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=1482"},"modified":"2007-10-22T06:26:33","modified_gmt":"2007-10-22T11:26:33","slug":"dump-the-cat","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=1482","title":{"rendered":"Dump The Cat"},"content":{"rendered":"

Socks the cat <\/strike>prop is back in the news<\/a>:<\/p>\n

AS THE \u201cfirst pet\u201d of the Clinton era, Socks, the White House cat, allowed \u201cchilly\u201d Hillary Clinton to show a caring, maternal side as well as bringing joy to her daughter Chelsea. So where is Socks today?<\/p>\n

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\u2019s personal secretary, who also had an embarrassing clean-up role in the saga of his relationship with the intern Monica Lewinsky.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

On the one hand, Sock should be thankful not to have ended up like Vince Foster, whose head Hillary personally stuffed into a civil war relic cannon and fired across the Potomac (or so I remember the story) [1<\/a>].<\/p>\n

On the other – what does this tell us about Hillary!?<\/p>\n

Clinton has been boosting her prospects in the past week with some homespun references to her gender as part of a series of events with the theme Women Changing America, during which she chatted girlfriend-to-girlfriend and mom-to-mom with female voters.The softening of Clinton\u2019s image seems to be working. Her chief strategist, Mark Penn, predicts that up to a quarter of Republican women will vote for her. She leads Democratic rivals in the polls by 26 points and is scooping up more donations to her war chest from Wall Street and defence contractors than any candidate from either party \u2013 an unmistakable indicator of who they think will win in 2008.<\/p>\n

Clinton\u2019s 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?<\/p>\n

\u201cIn the annals of human evil, off-loading a pet is nowhere near the top of the list,\u201d writes Caitlin Flanagan in the current issue of The Atlantic magazine. \u201cBut neither is it dead last, and it is especially galling when said pet has been deployed for years as an all-purpose character reference.\u201d<\/p>\n

Flanagan\u2019s article, headed No Girlfriend of Mine, points out that Clinton wrote a crowd-pleas-ing book Dear Socks, Dear Buddy: Kids\u2019 Letters to the First Pets, in which she claimed that only with the arrival of Socks and his \u201ctoy mouse\u201d did the White House \u201cbecome a home\u201d.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Someday, campaign to install our first cyborg <\/strike>female president will be taught as a case study in marketing classes worldwide.<\/p>\n

[1] Joke, joke, joke. Relax.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Socks the cat prop is back in the news: AS THE \u201cfirst pet\u201d of the Clinton era, Socks, the White House cat, allowed \u201cchilly\u201d Hillary Clinton to show a caring, maternal side as well as bringing joy to her daughter Chelsea. So where is Socks today? Once the presidency was over, there was no room […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1482","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-campaign-08"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1482","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1482"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1482\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1482"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1482"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1482"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}