Shortly after Kamala Harris became the Democrats’ choice of candidate this summer, cats emerged as front runners in the US presidential election. First came the swipe by JD Vance about Kamala Harris’s being a “childless cat lady”. The Ohio senator had originally made the jibe in a 2021 interview with Fox News as part of a wider grizzle about how “the entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children”. As Vance stepped forward as the Republican’s vice-presidential nominee in the high summer of 2024, someone dredged up his old comment and the cat ladies were enraged.
The first point of counterattack was an easy one. The fact that Harris has been a cherished stepmom to her husband’s two children for over a decade merely highlighted Vance’s record of trashing any family pattern that did not conform to a tradwife model. According to this playbook, a Presidential family must always consist of a middle-aged man in a suit, a glamorous wife, two school age children — and a dog: the Kennedys had Clipper, the Reagans had Peggy and the Obamas had Bo. Only the Clintons, who so spectacularly failed to live up to First Family normcore, were known as the owners of a cat, the infamous Socks.
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