Hillary's Cat Problem

In politics, personality trumps all else. Americans loved Ronald Reagan, just as they loved Bill Clinton, less for ideology than for personality. It's why Arnold is a star and Davis was a bum; why Villaraigosa is a hero and Hahn a goat. It's why W beat Gore and Kerry, and why Obama is even a contender. More often than not, the likable pol wins.

That points to Hillary Clinton's biggest problem -- she's not very likable. She works at it, and has done a good job these last few years of making herself look more like a human being and less like a politician. But deep down, people will always harbor the suspicion that she's just a cynical, calculating manipulator; every smile or act of home-spun decency the product of focus-group testing. Unlike her husband, she's just not a natural charmer.

And all the efforts at sincerity and compassion come undone whenever a story like this comes out:

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 anymore. 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 intern Monica Lewinsky....

Clinton wrote a crowd-pleasing 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.”

Being Clinton, she also lectured readers that pets are an “adoption instead of an acquisition” and warned them to look out for their safety.

Will Socks be seen as a metaphor for Clintonism? Will all the groups Hillary has adopted into her campaign -- gays, Chinese-Americans, middle Americans, women voters, moderates -- be dumped as soon as their political utility has expired?

A cat is just a cat, you say. Who cares about such trifles? We're at war!

You may be right, but little things mean a lot in politics. That's why Socks was brought into the Clinton limelight in the first place. The Clintons have long understood that symbols matter much more than platforms to much of the electorate. Socks was a way to show just how human they really are.

Now, it seems, he may have served his purpose all too well.