Vote for me, I'm a cat: Billings retiree unites a country divided by politics

Sue Fachini finds the current political climate so appalling that she's mounting an alternative ticket.

The Billings retiree has assembled a ballot populated entirely by neighborhood cats, and she has produced yard signs for their campaigns. Nell vs. Hobbs for governor, Jade vs. Diesel for president.

It sounds silly, but hear it out.

Would you rather vote for a candidate who lies, or a candidate who lies in the sun?

Fachini, who is 68, retired to Billings in 2008. She came from Portland, Oregon where she was a cop for 30 years, retiring as a detective investigating crimes against the elderly and vulnerable. She volunteers at St. Vincent Hospital and grows the finest peppers in Billings. Her neighbors happily receive them as gifts.

"Politics has gotten so ugly," she says.

And, cats are beautiful. Even ugly cats are beautiful. Vote beautiful.

And, yes, for the record, she is a childless cat lady, an intended insult she doesn't find insulting. But that is not a hint to her politics. She has strong opinions, but doesn't say what they are. There's a time and a place for that, she says.

And, one of those places is not on her porch.

Early one morning while standing in her front yard, in her pajamas and with a cup of coffee, a campaigner stopped by and soon became agitated.

"I asked her to leave. Who does that? Who allows politics to get them so wound up they get angry on a stranger's front lawn?," she said.

She sees something much more sinister than bad manners in the current political climate. She's Italian and her parents were immigrants. They saw the improbable and confounding rise of Benito Mussolini and the 400,000 deaths of his dictatorship.

"I wish my mother was still alive, but what's going on now, after what she had been through, would terrify her," Fachini said.

She lives in the Trees Streets neighborhood, a near-downtown neighborhood where yard signs hint at a divided politics. But, that's not the kind of neighbors they are, she said. When a wild wind storm blew through town last August, cracking large limbs onto her lawn, it was those neighbors who came with chainsaws.

"We may disagree among us, but what's important? We come together. We have to live in a way that we can live with each other," she said. "That's something we're losing with the way politics are now."

But, it's not something they're losing in the Tree Streets. Her neighbors love her "vote for cats" campaign as much as they love her peppers.

"They come by and they chuckle and they say thank you," she said. "It's nice when people chuckle about politics."

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