Kamala Harris and the Gentleman’s Agreement

The latest scandal to arise from the muck of the national Democratic Party concerns Kamala Harris’ husband, Doug Emhoff.

The Daily Mail broke a story about his love life BK (Before Kamala), and political reporters are trying to decide how to address it.

Should the earlier life of a presidential candidate’s husband matter? Sure. But should it matter as much as lots of other things? Maybe not. Still, there’s something about this particular story that’s more disturbing than one might expect.

It has been revealed that entertainment lawyer Doug Emhoff’s first marriage broke up, about five years before he met Kamala Harris, because he had an affair that resulted in the girlfriend getting pregnant.

Now, that’s not all that rare, unfortunately.

They are saying that he told Kamala the whole story before they got married, so it wasn’t kept a secret. It’s presented as a simple matter: he had an affair, it was the last straw in his first marriage, and he’d been divorced for about five years when he met Kamala Harris.

It happens.

But now we look at the next layer of the story.

He didn’t have an affair with a neighbor, or a coworker, or somebody he met in a bar.

The affair was with a teacher at their children’s school, the then 30-year-old Najen Naylor (according to the Daily Mail), whom the couple had also personally hired on as a nanny for their two children.

This paramour had two jobs – at both their private school and in their home.

Perhaps she was broke, and needed part time work in addition to her job at the school, as is often the case when an employer starts an affair with an employee he knows needs the money and therefore can’t afford to jeopardize her job by resisting his advances? If that’s the case, it’s a very old story indeed.

How old were the kids at this point? When this story broke in the summer of 2024, the Emhoff children were 29 and 25, which puts them at about 13 and 9 when their parents’ marriage was ended.

Keep doing the math. If it took a couple years to get the divorce done, the affair was when his kids were about 7 or 8 and 11 or 12, and therefore, very likely, old enough to notice that something was going on between their father and the nanny.

Now, I know what you’re thinking. Everybody makes mistakes when they’re young, where romance is concerned. Hard to hold it against people. Nobody’s perfect.

Okay, let’s accept that.

But in this case, the guy was no teenager with raging hormones; he was a married lawyer in his early 40s. In the entertainment business. Surely, if anybody ought to know better, it’s a high-ticket lawyer.

And who was Kamala Harris a decade ago, when she accepted this guy’s proposal?

She was already an extremely ambitious politician, a lawyer herself. She had served as district attorney for San Francisco, and was now (at the time she dated Doug Emhoff) holding statewide office – as the attorney general of the state of California!

Now, in this context, doesn’t all this sound peculiar?

Of all the people to marry (this was Kamala Harris’ first marriage, remember, even though it was to be Doug Emhoff’s second), she was an ambitious politician who was already the attorney general of the most populous state in the country and was looking for opportunities to move up beyond that. And yet, she was happy to marry a guy who had an incredibly indelicate dalliance “with the help.” (Note also that when he and his wife divorced, he did not marry the girl he’d gotten pregnant; they just went their separate ways).

Shouldn’t Kamala Harris, at this point, have been looking at her own future career aspirations and asking herself, is this particular match really a good idea?

This speaks to a lack of judgment on Harris’ part that could be not only embarrassing – a future scandal could hurt her political career once his love life is tied to hers – but even more than that; a future scandal could be criminal, as it could jeopardize national interests.

Once you’re already an Attorney General, there are only a few higher positions in politics left to aspire to. She had her sights set on the US Senate, or the governorship, or a cabinet level post in Washington – or even, Heaven forbid, the presidency or vice presidency.

(The fact that she’s ineligible under the Constitution’s Natural Born Citizen clause ought to have eliminated those last two options, but since the USA doesn’t enforce that rule anymore, the doors of the White House weren’t barred from her as the Framers had intended).**

You don’t have to be a denizen of Foggy Bottom or a political historian to imagine the risks that come with high office in Washington, D.C.

In addition to the usual electronic spying tactics of wiretaps and laptop hacking, our nation’s enemies are well known for continuing to use the oldest techniques to get information from highly placed sources: setting up a politician or her spouse with a lover, so there’s pillow talk to transmit, predates electronic surveillance by at least three thousand years.

One of the advantages of the female politician is that they are usually presumed to be less vulnerable to such methods, but that argument comes crashing down if they marry men who can be easily seduced.

Did love win out? Perhaps. In the end, Kamala Harris decided that Doug Emhoff’s vulnerability on this issue just didn’t bother her.

Well, as voters, it should bother us.

And even more so, the fact that it didn’t bother her ought to bother us.

If Kamala Harris wasn’t able to look ahead and see what a problem this match might pose for her future political ambitions, then we voters ought to. If her judgment is this poor, ours needs to be all the sharper as the election approaches.

There have always been women who knowingly married cheaters. Perhaps that’s between them, as private individuals, and it’s none of our business. If the guy’s rich, connected, dashing, perhaps he represents a step up for her, and she can avert her eyes when he strays.

This does become a matter for the electorate, however, when the wife seeks high office, especially if she’s representing a political party that’s already notorious for ethical compromise and foreign influence.

If Kamala Harris is comfortable putting this character in the White House, then we shouldn’t be comfortable putting her there either.

Copyright 2024 John F. Di Leo

** The Natural Born Citizen Clause requires at least one parent to be subject to U.S. Jurisdiction. Jurisdiction has 2 components, sovereignty (citizenship) and legal. A resident alien is not subject to the entire (sovereign) jurisdiction of the U.S.

John F. Di Leo is a Chicagoland-based international transportation and trade compliance professional and consultant.  A onetime Milwaukee County Republican Party chairman, he has been writing a regular column for Illinois Review since 2009.  His book on vote fraud (The Tales of Little Pavel) and his political satires on the current administration (Evening Soup with Basement Joe, Volumes I, II, and III), are available in either eBook or paperback, only on Amazon.

His newest nonfiction book, “Current Events and the Issues of Our Age,” was just released on July 1, and is also available, in both paperback and Kindle eBook, exclusively on Amazon.

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