Just curious: How inured is the media to “October surprises” about Democratic candidates and those around them that are probably somewhat accurate? Asking for the GOP.
I ask this because Doug Emhoff — the current second gentleman, looking to become first gentleman — is getting a complete Hunter-Biden-laptop get-out-of-jail free card about numerous, well-sourced allegations that the campaign’s symbol of “enlightened masculinity” is, in fact, an exemplar of actual, serious “toxic masculinity.” And he doesn’t deny them.
Instead, he merely calls them a “distraction.”
Which, to be fair, is probably accurate in its own way, the same way those aboard the Titanic noticed increased humidity and refrigeration levels on the evening of April 15, 1912.
To be clear, the allegations are only the latest revelations to indicate that, at least before his marriage to Harris in 2014, Emhoff was not a particularly nice guy. Initial allegations over the summer, also undenied by Emhoff, involved him impregnating his nanny while he was still married to his ex-wife.
He merely issued a statement in early August noting that he and his wife “went through some tough times on account of my actions” during his first marriage, which, you don’t say.
All was quiet on the Emhoff front for a while until a series of articles in the U.K. Daily Mail, the most damning of which accused him of public domestic abuse against a former girlfriend at the Cannes Film Festival in France in 2012.
No less than three sources corroborated the story, which claimed he “forcefully slapped [his] ex-girlfriend for flirting with another man.”
Emhoff’s people — not Emhoff himself, mind you — denied these allegations, although in an odd way: in a statement to Semafor published in their daily newsletter, in which they said “this report is untrue” and “any suggestion that he would or has ever hit a woman is false.”
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Again, not to say that Semafor isn’t a legit outlet, but it’s a start-up favored by wonkish types. If this were slander and libel, this would be something Emhoff himself should be shouting from the rooftops, not having his people quietly deny to a niche new media publication. (Although even Semafor’s Max Tani noted the import behind the allegations: “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.’”)
Then a further report, again from the U.K. Daily Mail, accused him of being a sleazy boss when he was head of law firm Venable’s Los Angeles office between 2006 to 2017, particularly when it came to sexist treatment against female staffers, and very particularly when it came to attractive ones who didn’t flirt with him. (The report also alleged he had a “trophy secretary” for himself.)
Again, perhaps not the guy you wan’t discussing the feminist themes in the song “Better Man.” Anyway, Emhoff himself “answered” these claims (emphatic air-quotes around that word) during a softball interview with MSNBC host Joe Scarborough that will air in full on Monday.
In a clip released Friday, Scarborough asked him to respond to what he termed vague “tabloid stories about your personal life” and “incredibly crude and lewd” suggestions that former President Donald Trump has made about his wife’s past.
(One can only assume he means suggestions that she got jobs by being the girlfriend of then-60-year-old California Assembly Speaker Willie Brown when she was 29. Which is true; just ask Brown, who became mayor of San Francisco and admitted in a 2019 letter to the city’s newspaper of record that he “may have influenced her career by appointing her to two state commissions when I was Assembly speaker.”)
“I think I’d be pissed off,” Scarborough said. “How do you all stay centered? How do you stay disciplined and not really go off and not really push back hard at these things?”
“We don’t have time to be pissed off,” Emhoff said in response. “We don’t have time to focus on it. It’s all a distraction. It’s designed to try to get us off our game.”
Now, notice what you don’t get in there, which is a denial. Perhaps it’s because Scarborough has done the job for him: He’s already assumed these are all filthy lies.
Then again, this is the man who did the heavy lifting by assuming President Joe Biden was “so sharp” — before, of course, the June 27 debate that led to a concatenation of events that now has us debating Doug Emhoff’s past and fitness to be first gentleman as opposed to second gentleman.
So maybe letting, oh, Joe Scarborough do your heavy lifting for you and calling this a “distraction” isn’t your best course of action. You might want to weave an “obviously, this is all falsehoods and lies” in there, and perhaps he did. We’ll see Monday. However, in that quote — where he was given ample opportunity to actively deny and decry those “tabloid stories” — he was just like, eh, “distraction.”
And therein lies the problem for Kamala Harris’ campaign: What if this happens to be demonstrably true somehow?
Let’s leave aside the claims of sleazy boss-hood for a second, although they do speak to a wider pattern about a man selling himself as the left’s paragon of new, non-toxic masculinity when he’s just the opposite. The Daily Mail went with no less than three sources who presented them with contemporaneous evidence, including text messages and data, which corroborate the story of his ex-girlfriend, currently a high-powered New York attorney.
That’s literally partner abuse, which is literally illegal in literally every civilized Western country. It’s also literally “toxic masculinity.” And not Joe Biden “literally” literally — which is figuratively but in underlined bolded italics — but quite literally a crime, and a sexist one.
It would also be another media cover-up for a Democratic campaign in the final month of the presidential election.
Now, mind you, this isn’t to the extent of what was contained on Hunter Biden’s poxed laptop, or the extent of the cover-up Joe Biden’s campaign engaged in to make sure that story didn’t get attention. That story spoke to something substantive about Biden himself, whether he had enabled his son’s problematic dealings with overseas entities, and whether or not he had lied to the American people about the extent to which he knew about it.
The reason this is an issue that could reverberate with the aftershock of the “laptop from hell” is that there’s nothing substantive about the Harris-Walz campaign. You’ve heard it before: This is about “joy and vibes.” More specifically, it’s Joe Biden’s presidency with a cooler, younger person out in front of it and “joy and vibes” used to cover over all of the problems — except for Biden’s mental infirmity — that made Biden supremely unpopular.
The only reason this has worked to any extent is because the media has cooperated. This alternate reality is now the operative reality mostly because MSNBC and CBS News tell us it is. We’ve barely heard from Harris — outside of scripted settings, aside from a ridiculous debate where the moderators were the only winners and a few interviews which haven’t gone so hot. And we’ve had virtually no serious examination of her past or the past of those around her, even scrutiny of the obvious lies of Tim “Knucklehead” Walz.
Thus, if it turns out that Doug Emhoff’s sexism and partner abuse has been basically lying out in the open for anyone who wanted to look for it to find it and nobody looked, or even asked, we suddenly have to examine the fact that this is a media-fabricated campaign to an extent we’ve never seen before. It would be credibility-shattering for everyone involved.
That — not just Doug Emhoff’s alleged sordid past — is the kind of “October surprise” that could really cost Kamala Harris the presidency: Once you see that the campaign behind the curtain is an utter sham, one hopes even the establishment media would have to start asking itself hard questions about its own credulity that neither it nor Harris-Walz can appropriately answer.
Or maybe not — but Americans will, and with the polls as close as they are, that’s not something the Democrats can afford. That’s why this non-denial could end up coming back and costing Harris precious votes she can’t lose.
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