Opinion: Abuse in the Office, Love in the Home?

By John F. Di Leo, Opinion Contributor

Why do we fall in love?

Or to put it another way – How do we choose our partners?

With candidates for public office, the spouse rarely factors into our consideration as voters. It’s the congressman or senator who’ll be casting votes in the House or Senate, not the candidate’s wife or husband.

So, with most political campaigns, the spouse is a sort of bonus character in the game. Some speak on their spouse’s behalf at local civic meetings, some don’t. For generations, the likable suburban housewife humanized her serious business-focused husband, for example, providing family photos that make the candidate more electable, but there was rarely any analysis beyond that point.

The Presidency is different.

The First Lady – or in the case of a female candidate, the First Husband – is important, usually not on most policy matters (though past First Ladies have often focused on a single major issue such as literacy promotion or drug avoidance), but on the general demeanor of the White House.

As voters and constituents, we pay attention to the courtship stories of our presidents. We know that the Reagans met while they were actors in Hollywood; the Clintons met when they were political activists at Yale Law School. George W. Bush credits Laura for helping him to sober up; Barack Obama’s pastor famously set him up with Michelle so he could pose as straight.

So, it is fair to explore the relationship between Kamala Harris and her husband, lawyer Doug Emhoff.

When they married, both were 50-year-old lawyers – Emhoff an entertainment lawyer in the private sector, Harris the Attorney General of the state of California.

Emhoff was divorced, and the circumstances of his divorce were first revealed when the Daily Mail (UK) broke the story this summer that he had been carrying on an affair with the couple’s children’s nanny (who was also their schoolteacher) and got her pregnant. The couple divorced, but he did not marry the young lady.

Harris, by contrast, at 50, had never been married, though she was in a well known long-term affair with Willie Brown, the most powerful politician in the state, when she was about 30, and Brown was thirty years her senior. She had no publicized relationships in the intervening 20 years.

Why did she pick Doug Emhoff to marry, at age 50? He must have been quite a catch, if the only other guy she saw fit to date was one who could appoint her to high-paying statewide commissions with a car allowance and an expense account.

It’s tempting to think it might be a marriage of convenience – she’s the state attorney general and he runs a law firm. In high powered legal circles, such a match might be helpful to each other’s careers – at least, a lifetime of watching legal dramas on television would present that scenario.

But at 50, her career already established, having won both countywide and now statewide office, her political career didn’t need such a marriage. When she was 30, sure. But not at 50, her reelection certain as the incumbent in a pure-blue state.

It’s reasonable to assume that they really do get along; they really do compliment each other as a couple.

And recently broken news stories tell us exactly what they have in common.

In a series of articles published by the UK Daily Mail, Doug Emhoff has been revealed as a tyrannical boss at his law firm. Former partners and employees have happily spilled the news to Daily Mail correspondents about what it was like working for Emhoff in California.

According to these stories, deep in this modern, liberal enclave of southern California, office life with Emhoff was a throwback to the days of Billy Wilder’s classic film “The Apartment” or of the hit TV series “Mad Men.” Emhoff would hire people based on their looks, harass employees at will, blow up at staffers and female partners in meetings, and famously “put associates in their place.”

To hear the Daily Mail tell it, working for Doug Emhoff is a rung on one’s career ladder that only a masochist could love.

Add to this the quiet revelations over the years of how Kamala Harris treats her employees, and we get a better picture of their relationship.

Kamala Harris hasn’t been in Washington all that long – just six years – but in that time she’s built up an unusual statistic: she has the worst staff retention record in Washington. Only about 10% of her staffers stayed with her more than a year or two, both when she was a US Senator and since being installed in the vice-presidency. As of this summer, 91.5% of the staffers she started with in the executive branch have quit or been fired.

It’s more difficult to get reasons out of political appointees, because in Washington, staffers are often wedded to their party, so they won’t slam even an embarrassing officeholder in public, to protect the party’s reputation.

But when you read these articles – and especially when you read between the lines in them – you get a clear picture of a bully (multiple former staffers use the term, not just one) who has no interest in preparing for work by reading briefing books or source materials, but demands that every interview, every case, every task goes perfectly or it will be some staffer’s head on the plate.

She berates employees for failing to do what she wanted, without giving clear instructions. She throws people under the bus when talking to the press, saying that the staffers responsible for this or that issue had failed to keep her apprised of it. She always finds someone else to blame for her own failures. And since all she does is fail, that’s a lot to put on her staff.

One would be tempted to wonder if these are just incompetent employees, and she’s bad at hiring. That’s no sin; even the best people sometimes choose the wrong people when setting up a new office from scratch.

But as former staffer Gil Duran told NPR this summer, she built an experienced staff, full of Democrats who had worked for bigger and better operations, who wanted to be part of this “first female person of color” operation. And virtually all of them ended up regretting their decision to join her train wreck of an office, as demonstrated by their astounding exit rate.

So there we have it. We know what it is that brought Doug Emhoff and Kamala Harris together.

It wasn’t the sweetness of youth’s first love, or the mutual respect of two entrepreneurs, two political activists, two schoolteachers – active in their church or garden club, or chamber of commerce or industry group, as so many other political couples have been built from, over the years.

What we now know Emhoff and Harris to have in common is much darker than that. It’s a management style, a fondness for tyrannizing an office, for abusing the individual and deflecting blame. It’s the love of finding a scapegoat and feeling joy in demeaning someone else, especially someone in an inferior position.

Many of us have had the misfortune to work for, or near, such a boss at some point in our careers. Remember the abusive boss, the blame-deflector, the manager who steals your good ideas without giving credit or blames you for messes they caused? Remember the tyrant who drives off customers and colleagues alike because nobody can stand working for or with them?

Hopefully, if you’ve had such a boss yourself, you’ve escaped before too much time passed, as 91.5% of Harris’ staffers have.

President Trump has a record as a demanding boss too; but his record is one of clear instructions, and the cabinet members he fires are those who undermined administration goals. He didn’t fire good employees because of his own failures. And Mr. Trump is never too lazy to read a briefing book.

Kamala Harris, by contrast, appoints people brighter than she is, then drives them off by abuse. And as the Daily Mail reveals, her husband has the same proclivities.

It’s a love story, of a sort.

But it’s not one we need in the White House.

Copyright 2024 John F. Di Leo