The last thing that Vice President Kamala Harris should probably be making bold clapback statements to — at the moment — is criticism of her family life. Which means, of course, that’s exactly what she’s doing.
In an interview on the “Call Her Daddy” podcast published Sunday, Harris implied that criticism of her family life was the result of conservative prudishness, saying that “this is not the 1950s,” according to The Hill.
Now, it’s worth noting the context of the remarks, which had to do with comments from GOP Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders.
Sanders, a former White House press secretary under Donald Trump, said during a town hall with the again-GOP nominee that Harris “doesn’t have anything keeping her humble” because she hasn’t had children of her own, noting that children of your own are a “permanent reminder of what’s important.”
A little bit of a below-the-belt dig? Perhaps, especially since Harris is a stepmother to her husband Doug Emhoff’s children. Sanders also went on to clarify that she “would never criticize a woman for not having children, the point I was making and that Kamala Harris confirmed by her own admission is that she doesn’t believe our leaders should be humble, which explains her arrogant claim that she alone can fix our nation’s problems after spending the last four years making them worse.”
Any intelligent Democrat would realize the media would do the heavy lifting for her on this one and just, to quote one of the veep’s more famous supporters, shake it off. Instead, Harris decided to give America an ugly reminder about just what her values really are.
“Family comes in many forms, and I think that, increasingly, you know, all of us understand that, you know, this is not the 1950s anymore,” she said.
“Families come in all kinds of shapes and forms, and they’re family nonetheless.”
Let’s ignore any debate about the data regarding what type of familial structure sets a child up for success, because — while it’s yet another happy-clappy “Free to Be You and Me” liberal platitude that’s turned out to be a pernicious lie — the first part of the statement is the key here.
Are you voting for Donald Trump?
This isn’t just a response to a very specific criticism by Sanders about whether Harris has given birth, but rather a blanket indictment that seems to lump all criticism of her private life under the auspices of the kind of people who want to go back to the Lucy-and-Ricky separate-beds era of the American family.
And there’s a bit of subtext here, to boot. The Sunday interview comes just four days after the latest scandal to befall the second couple’s life before they were married. This time dealing with her husband, Doug Emhoff.
According to a report in the U.K.’s Daily Mail, sources say that Emhoff — now 59 — “forcefully slapped” an ex-girlfriend for allegedly flirting with another man after an alcohol-fueled night at the Cannes Film Festival in France in 2012.
The report was based off of three sources close to the former girlfriend, described by the Mail as “a successful New York attorney” they referred to pseudonymously as “Jane.”
One source said “that the woman called him immediately after the incident, sobbing in her cab, and described the alleged assault,” the outlet noted.
“A second friend said Jane, who had been dating Emhoff for three months, also told her about the alleged violence at the time. A third friend told DailyMail.com that Jane first told her in 2014 that she had dated Emhoff, and recounted the full story of his alleged abuse in 2018, when then senator Harris was in the news after grilling Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh in a Senate hearing over sexual assault allegations.”
All three sources “shared with DailyMail.com pictures of him and Jane together from 2012, and other documents and communications corroborating elements of the story.”
“It was something like 3 a.m.,” one of the sources said. “They were trying to get out of there, and they both had been drinking. There was a gigantic line for taxis.
“[Jane] went up to one of the valet guys, offered him 100 Euros or whatever, to get to the head of the line. She told me she put her hand on his shoulder.
“Doug apparently thought that she was flirting and came over and slapped her in the face.”
“She put her hand on the valet’s shoulder, and as she was talking to him, Doug comes up,” said another source. “She said he turned her around by her right shoulder, and she was completely caught off guard.
“He hauled up and slapped her so hard she spun around. She said she was in utter shock.”
A day later, a spokesman for Emhoff discreetly released a terse statement to Semafor — a legit outlet, to be sure, but not exactly The New York Times or CNN when it comes to getting your message out there front and center — saying that “this report is untrue” and “any suggestion that he would or has ever hit a woman is false.”
This also comes a few months after a report that Emhoff, while still married to his former wife, impregnated his nanny. There was no denial of that one, just a vague statement that he and his wife “went through some tough times on account of my actions. I took responsibility, and in the years since, we worked through things as a family and have come out stronger on the other side.”
“Tough times?” You don’t say.
Now, adultery and impregnating nannies and drunken partner abuse did happen during the 1950s, yes. I’d like to think we looked less kindly upon certain aspects of that kind of thing back then. But even then, these kinds of things are hurting the Harris-Emhoff brand, as Semafor’s Max Tani noted following the statement from the spokesman: “This is a new campaign front: Emhoff has been a key Harris’ advocate, cast as a relatable, enlightened ‘wife guy’ and father who ‘discussed the feminism of Pearl Jam.’”
And while we’re at this, let’s please not forget Harris’ interesting romantic choices. When she was 29, she was the latest in the string of girlfriends flaunted in public by then-California Assembly speaker and future San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown. He was, at the time, 60 and married — although he and his wife had been separated since the 1980s and had a very San Francisco arrangement in which he basically aired his adulteries in public without shame.
While it’s unfair to say that Brown is solely responsible for Harris’ political career — if every one of Willie Brown’s girlfriends had a similar career trajectory, California would have 627 senators, all female — the notoriously patronage-happy politician said in a letter to the San Francisco Chronicle in 2018 that he “may have influenced her career by appointing her to two state commissions when I was Assembly speaker.”
I repeat myself: You don’t say.
Harris was, at the time, so young that one reporter mistook her for Brown’s daughter. No, this isn’t the kind of thing that would have happened in the 1950s. And that’s a reason we would want to go back to the 1950s.
It’s not a particularly salient argument against that decade’s mores. Rather, it’s a reminder we threw a very big baby out with the bathwater sometime during the moral revolution that’s happened in the intervening years. And yes, of course there was a lot of bathwater: Jim Crow. Open bigotry and sexism. Polio. Everything bad that happened in the first few verses of “We Didn’t Start the Fire,” basically.
However, the blanket criticism of the Harris-Emhoff family can’t just be dismissed as mid-20th century WASP-ish moralism for a bevy of reasons.
First, the left has made plenty of hay over Donald Trump’s family life. You’ve heard the jokes: Trump believes in family values so much that he’s had three of them. Oh yes, and Stormy Daniels, too! Meanwhile, I’d never heard “devout Catholic” used so many times in a positive way than during the 2020 campaign when referring to Joe Biden’s religious beliefs. Now we question the dubious romantic entanglements of the couple atop the Democratic ticket, and we’re told not to go back to those old-timey days of believing in Biblical values? Give me a break.
Second, this behavior isn’t just “weird,” as Tim Walz would say. Abusing a woman is illegal. Impregnating your nanny while you’re married is immoral, as is dating a married man who may have kinda sorta helped your career along by appointing you to a few state boards.
These were things that would end your career in the 1950s — or even more recently. They tried to end Donald Trump’s career over less in the not-too-distant past. Now, we’re being told to lighten up and don’t be the double-bed Ricardo types.
If there was ever a worse time for Harris or her campaign to remind America of how things were when marriage and family were venerated institutions, I’m having trouble thinking of it.
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