The President can’t run again, and candidates from both parties are already aggressively seeking the nomination to succeed him.
What does this have to do with cats? You’ll find the answer in this classic of feline fiction that tells the hilarious, heartwarming story of the role of two clever cats in the political process.
Every cat person knows, as do many others, that cats possess mysterious mental and communicative abilities that defy human understanding and stagger human imagination. But can two cats who make up their minds to sabotage the presidential campaign of a conniving, villainous and extremely wealthy United State senator even have a chance of succeeding?
As soon as you meet Napoleon and Mr. Grover, the feline protagonists of this novel, you’ll know the answer. We first encounter Mr. Grover as a handsome young gray tabby escaping the clutches of a medical researcher who collects stray cats to perform cruel and painful experiments on them. Fifteen years later he reappears as a huge, elderly, battle-scarred former stray who is now the beloved friend of no less than the governor of the state, Seth Goodfellow. Down-to-earth, highly respected and eminently qualified, the governor is being urged by leaders of his party to seek its presidential nomination.
Napoleon, an aristocratic red-orange not-quite-Persian longhair, meets the streetwise and cynical Mr. Grover when his human, a talented young Washington newspaper reporter named Stanley Blister, is hired to handle media relations for Gov. Goodfellow in his primary campaign against U.S. Sen. Desmond Durth, a diabolical, scheming, multimillionaire doctor who left the drug company he founded to run for Congress and now has his sights set on the White House.
Mr. Grover, looking forward to retirement when the governor’s term of office ends, is dead set against the idea of having his human become president. All that changes, however, when the old cat has occasion to meet Sen. Durth, sniffs him and discovers that this is the very same scoundrel who 15 years earlier took him fraudulently from an animal shelter and was planning to perform vivisection on him.
Mr. Grover and Napoleon decide that the nation as a whole, animals in general and cats in particular must be saved from having a monster such as this in the White House. They form and unlikely and guarded alliance to send Durth’s campaign down in flames, and the story of how they do it will leave you laughing, crying and inspired by Mr. Grover’s earthy wisdom and the governor’s gentle philosophy about the qualities a president should have. The clever detective work of both Napoleon and Stanley foils the evil senator’s dirty tricks in ways that fill the story with suspense and surprises. And there’s even a bit of cat romance when Napoleon meets the governor’s daughter’s beautiful white Persian:
She observes him with an air of superiority. “My name is Victoria. I was named for the queen of England.”
Big deal, thinks Napoleon. “Well, I’m Napoleon, and I was named for my houseboy’s grandfather. But I think there was also an emperor of France by that name.”
The Politicats is funny, intelligent political satire, and author Tom Williams has plenty to say through his delightfully outspoken cat characters about the absurdities of the American political system as well as of the human race. He not only gets his message across, but leaves the reader smiling.
The Politicats is available in hard cover, 180 pages, for $13.95 plus $3 shipping, or two copies for $24.95, plus $4 shipping. Send a check or money order to WR Corp. Publishing, Post Office Box 108, Chattanooga, Tenn. 37401.
