Whither Socks the Cat

Ever wonder what happened to the Clinton's 'First Cat' Socks? Caitlin Flanagan who writes for The Atlantic did and has these words to say:

No Girlfriend of Mine
Sometimes I imagine Betty Currie (remember her?) starting another long morning of her golden retirement. She pours a cup of coffee, glances at the headlines of the newspaper on the kitchen table, and then, with a sigh of infinite resignation, she cinches the belt on her dressing gown a little tighter, finds a plastic bag, and heads to the bathroom to clean the litter box of a former celebrity.

When I first heard, during the strange final days of Bill Clinton�s presidency, that the first couple were going to jettison Socks, the family cat, I assumed that it was one of those weird rumors that attach themselves to the Clintons, in this case one easily dispelled: a single photograph of the kitty happily curled up on a window seat in his new home, and that would be the end of it. But then, as so often happens with weird rumors that attach themselves to the Clintons, the story turned out to be 100 percent true. Reporters asked Bill about it during a press conference, and he hemmed and hawed. As the final days passed by�which, as you may recall, included a newsy sluice of pardons and outrages, hardly a time when journalists had to invest minor incidents with greater importance�reporters couldn�t quite get their heads around the business with the cat.

In this hour of crisis, the official Socks the Cat Fan Club sent an inquiry to its namesake�s most stalwart champion. Hillary�s Senate office replied with a note�at once chilly and patronizing� suggesting, more or less, that they butt out.

The remaining part of the article is only available to subscribers but fortunatly, Sarah Baxter at the London Times picked up the article and wrote about it:

Ouch! Hillary Clinton's softer image is clawed over dumped cat
As the �first pet� of the Clinton era, Socks, the White House cat, allowed �chilly� 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 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.

And a bit more:

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.�

Flanagan�s article, headed No Girlfriend of Mine, points out that Clinton wrote a crowd-pleas-ing book Dear Socks, Dear Buddy: Kids� Letters to the First Pets, in which she claimed that only with the arrival of Socks and his �toy mouse� did the White House �become a home�.

A politician in the very worst sense of the word... I hope that she has her ass handed to her on a platter in 2008.