The Subliminal Emhoff

From the first time I saw a photo of Second Dude Doug Emhoff, I thought there weas something cheesy about the guy. Yesterday the UK Daily Mail confirmed my surmise:

Kamala Harris’s husband’s first marriage ended after he got his children’s nanny pregnant, DailyMail.com can exclusively reveal.

Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff cheated on his first wife Kerstin with the blonde nanny, who also taught at their children’s pricey private school.

OK, we're dealing with R-rated materai here that will never get a full explication in polite opinion, but one of my chief interests is Trump's ability to exploit subliminal messages, and boy, is this a subliminal message. Let's start with the question I had before any of the nanny business broke: there's nothing special about Emhoff, especially in the sex appeal department. Among his peers, former Hollywood lawyers around 60 years old, is Kevin Morris, at least in photos a much sexier guy who unlike the Second Dude has managed to keep his first marriage together.

So from the start I always kind of asked what Kamala was doing with him, because she's much more of a national figure who for her age is at least not a frump, whereas Emhoff is kind of a nebbishy male frump. A subsidciary puzzle was what the appeal of Emhoff was to Dr Jill that she would let herself be caught French kissing Mr Nebbishy Frump at last year's State of the Union. So these questions already bothered me.

But here's another. Arhold Schwarzenegger's reputation took a hit when his wife, Maria Shriver, divorced him after learning he'd fathered a child with the couple's longtime housekeeper. But I have a feeling the public tends to give men like Schwarzenegger, Bill Clinton, and Donald Trump himself something of a pass -- they are, or were in their prime, attractive alpha males.

Doug Emhoff is not, he's more in Harvey Weinstein's class. If he's gotta get an outside piece, it's not as though starlets and interns are lining up at the office door. He's gotta schtup the governess, there's nobody else. And the governess has to go along, or she'll lose her job. But this is being a sexual predator, a Harvey Weinstein. Mr Cheesy's current wife, Kamala Harris. is against sexual predators:

"As many of you know, before I was elected Vice President and before I was elected a United States Senator, I was an elected Attorney General and an elected District Attorney. And before that, I was a courtroom prosecutor.

"So, in those roles, I took on perpetrators of all kinds. Predators who abused women. . . . So hear me when I say: I know Donald Trump's type. I know the type and I have been dealing with people like him."

So what's she doing married to a bush-league Harvey Weinstein? Nor can she insist that she's shocked, shocked:

The relationship and the circumstances around it were known four years ago to Joe Biden’s vetting committee as Harris was herself going through the running mate process before being picked for the ticket, a person familiar with the conversations told CNN. The person also said that Emhoff had told Harris about the affair well before they got married.

So apparently that makes it OK, huh? But we still have the problem that Michaelah Montgomery raised while speaking at a Trump rally in Atlanta last night:

Former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown admitted in 2020 to an extramarital affair with Kamala Harris.

Brown also admitted to giving Harris her first official state job.

In a short article in the San Francisco Chronicle Brown admitted to the extra-marital affair and to appointing Harris to two state commissions.

. . . “Aside from her record as a prosecutor, why don’t we ask Mrs. Willie Brown if Kamala Harris cares about black families,” Montgomery said.

But beyond the sexual histories of both partners, we have the peculiar, indeed weird, situation that Emhoff's ex-wife seems to think she, Kamala, Doug, and the kids are all still in some kind of blended family. I quoted her last week:

". . . For over 10 years, since Cole and Ella were teenagers, Kamala has been a co-parent with Doug and I,” Kerstin Emhoff said in a statement first provided to CNN. “She is loving, nurturing, fiercely protective, and always present. I love our blended family and am grateful to have her in it.”

Kamala herself agrees that this is all one big, happy, blended family, and Doug's ex is her BFF:

Just before the 2020 election, Harris spoke again about the importance of her blended family and how Kerstin Emhoff played a significant role in ensuring her relationship with her two step-children was positive.

“One of the keys to my relationship with Cole and Ella is their mom,” Harris told CNN at the time. “The thing about blended families — if everyone approaches it in the way that there’s plenty of love to share, then it works.”

In a 2020 profile in The Washington Post about Doug Emhoff, Kerstin Emhoff recalled one night when she, her ex-husband and Harris were having dinner in Manhattan. Kerstin Emhoff said she “nearly spit out her wine” when she learned that Doug Emhoff surprised Harris with a trip to Italy, which he planned entirely.

“I don’t know what you’ve done to this man,” Kerstin Emhoff recalled telling Harris. “But it’s great.”

Well, as long as there's plenty of love to share, it's copacetic, at least at Esalen. But this is strange. It goes beyond schtupping interns or romping with porn stars, there's something a lot deeper going on here, and the governess business can't be isolated. There's got to be more that will come out. How, for instance, does the French kiss with Dr Jill fit into the blended family?

But even if nothing further does emerge, there are two issues. One is the subliminal effect of the wannabe First Dude schtupping the governess and Kamala apparently being OK enough with it to marry Mr Cheesy. The other is that the Biden vetting team was aware of it in 2020 and thought it wasn't a problem. How'd that happen?