Vice President Kamala Harris was picked for Biden’s 2020 ticket because, with her far-left politics, she could appeal to the Democratic Party’s more radical wing. She’s an enthusiastic feminist and loves pushing wokeness at every opportunity. So how does she feel about her husband’s clumsy — and controversial — attempt to pay her a compliment?
The reactions are pretty funny. https://t.co/NSYOVY5s8Z
— The Western Journal (@WestJournalism) March 16, 2023
On March 15, Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff, Harris’ husband of nine years, was a featured speaker at the South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas. It was scheduled to be a pretty vanilla event — it was billed as “Douglas Emhoff in Conversation with Symone Sanders-Townsend” — but Emhoff still managed to spark up some online backlash. Sanders-Townsend, a former adviser to Harris, was supposed to set Emhof up with questions that would let him talk about “the power and importance of having women in leadership positions.” Unfortunately for him, that quickly got overshadowed.
When Sanders-Townsend asked Emhoff to tell her something surprising about Harris, Emhoff replied that the vice president is “exceedingly normal.” That probably wasn’t what she expected to hear, and it certainly wasn’t what everyone on the internet expected to hear, either. Although Emhoff went on to praise Harris as “an awesome wife,” the damage was already done.
Twitter immediately caught fire as people dived in to comment on Emhoff’s lukewarm compliment. One commenter offered “a free piece of advice: never refer to your wife as ‘exceedingly normal.’” Another said that when you have to publicly say someone is normal that’s a red flag, while a third asked, “Did he mean below average?”
To be fair, not everyone found Emhoff’s comment surprising. One Twitter user said, “Oh, I think we’ve gotten that part” — and that probably wasn’t meant as a compliment. Harris does seem normal, so why is she vice president? In theory, at least, it’s the second most powerful post in the government; it should be filled by someone who’s extraordinary, smart, and talented — not a woman whose own husband can’t think of anything better to say about her than “she’s exceedingly normal.”