Irish Examiner view: Kamala Harris aims to make history, not least with the first US 'First Gentleman'
Doug Emhoff is already the 'Second Gentleman' in the white House. Next month we will learn if US vice president Kamala Harris will become the first commander-in-chief to be married to a First Gentleman. Picture: Erin Schaff/The New York Times/AP
The US election, now less than three weeks away, appears increasingly to be on a knife edge and is being characterised by some commentators as the “boys v girls” battle for the White House because of the gender split among voters.
While Kamala Harris attempts to make history in a number of ways — the first woman and the first person of Asian ancestry to serve as president — there will be another groundbreaking achievement if she enters the Oval Office. She will be the first US commander-in-chief to be married to a First Gentleman.
For that indeed will be the official title of her husband, Doug Emhoff, 60. He will also be the first Jewish spouse for an American president. He was born in Brooklyn and his ancestors arrived in the US at the end of the 19th century from Gorlice, a small town in Poland about 120km south of Krakow.
In this campaign of marginal gains, it is difficult to predict how Emhoff’s heritage will impact on his wife’s prospects, although he has been a prominent figure in the Biden administration’s stance against antisemitism. They have been married since 2014 and he has two adult children from his previous marriage.
Typically, with the notable exceptions of Eleanor Roosevelt, Nancy Reagan, and Hilary Clinton, presidential partners have kept a low profile politically, but matters can no longer be considered typical as the contesting parties look for anything which might generate a small advantage.
This goes some way to explaining the careful messaging adopted by Harris on various issues which might have been considered inviolable by Democrat strategists — immigration policies, climate change, and LGBTQ rights.
This is not a moment when off-the-cuff declarations can be left hostage to fortune and party historians may recall the explanation of Lyndon B Johnson when he was accused of a piece of political chicanery to win senate election. “To do good,” he told critics, “first you gotta be elected.” Kamala Harris must be aware, because the polls say so, that her country is now more to the right than when she and Joe Biden successfully campaigned in 2019 which explains why she tried to put some perceptual distance between herself and the 48th president during her interview with Fox News this week.
So far, nothing has dramatically shifted the tectonic plates underpinning support levels for both parties. The nearest we have seen to what American correspondents have been calling “an October surprise” were the highly dramatic hurricanes, Helene and Milton, which smashed into the Carolinas, Georgia, and Florida.
Trump has used the events to underpin his arguments, claiming federal emergency agencies have been diverting disaster relief funds to house illegal immigrants.
None of the swing states have a polling gap that is larger than the margin for error. In some of them, the difference is less than one percentage point.
Neither side has the space or the time to fumble the ball and recover. We are heading for a rerun of 2020 where turnout figures and votes will be challenged and rancour could be high.
Americans like to say that November is the month for thanks and giving. But in 2024 it may feel much longer than usual.
The agreement by the Catholic church in Los Angeles to pay more than €800m for historic sex abuse claims marks one of the most damning episodes in a grotesque saga, but fails to deliver an end to the story.
The settlement brings the cumulative payouts in lawsuits to the equivalent of nearly €1.5bn and is the largest single sum agreed by an archdiocese.
The Archdiocese of Los Angeles, the nation’s largest with four million people and 300 parishes, has paid the compensation to 1,353 people who say they were abused by Catholic clergy when they were young children. Seventeen years ago, LA paid more than €600m following lawsuits brought by 508 people.
While Archbishop José H Gomez said he was sorry for every incident “from the bottom of my heart” he also warned “there are a lot more dominoes in California to come down”, referring to other dioceses that have not reached settlements or gone into protective bankruptcy.
These include the Archdiocese of San Francisco and the dioceses of Oakland and San Diego, all of which cited the looming threats of civil lawsuits.
The Los Angeles compensation has been funded by the extensive sale of real estate, liquidation of investments, and loans. Donations designated for parishes, schools, and specific mission campaigns will not be used for the settlement.
While the agreement can be regarded as a milestone, and the financial damage to the church for claims which have spanned the course of decades is enormous, the toll of psychological damage and loss of trust in the institution is incalculable and an irredeemable tragedy.
Among the advantages held out to us through the use of technology, and its increasingly restless bedfellow, artificial intelligence, is a frictionless passage through the many transactions of life.
Central to that opportunity is the ability to manage multiple, boringly repetitive, processes. Car parking fees, for example. Or road tolling. Or congestion charging. Or pay-per-mile driving which, if not yet commonplace, is certainly something that a visionary town or transport planner near you will be thinking about right now.
All of these systems rely on a feature which is already ubiquitous. Automatic number plate recognition (Anpr) is deployed across the world. It’s heavily used by security services and police. Most of us never give it a second thought as it tracks us hither and thither.
But today’s modern criminal is nothing if not international. From Dubai to Darjeeling; from New York to Nagasaki you don’t have to look far to uncover news about various forms of car number plate scams.
This week we heard how Sheila O’Sullivan from Killarney received requests from eFlow, the French-owned company which manages traffic tagging on Ireland’s motorways, for payment for five separate journeys on the M50. The firm helpfully appended a photograph of Ms O’Sullivan’s car, as their usual method of saying “gotcha”. Except that Ms O’Sullivan has never been on this stretch of road, for which many drivers may say she should feel devoutly grateful. And the car in the snapshot was not her car. It was a Kia all right. Just not her Kia.
“My car would have been parked at home in Killarney. I knew obviously it wasn’t me, so I rang eFlow services, and they asked me to confirm my car and what colour it was, but because the picture was taken at night, it was hard to see the colour of the car,” she said.
It is believed that criminals trawl dealer sites to find registrations matching their car type before fixing fake number plates and using the vehicle to carry out burglaries and other activities.
That is what Ms O’Sullivan believes took place in her case but asks at least two reasonable questions. What would have happened if the vehicle had been in a burglary or hit and run? And why do dealers and sellers not always take the precaution of pixelating number plates before placing them online?
This is generally a standard operating procedure with media companies and others and there is a prevailing view that car number plates can represent personal information and be protected under the general data protection regulation to prevent the identification and tracking.
It is of some reassurance that contested cases are reviewed by an eFlow senior agent, but is less comforting that the onus is on the victim to contact gardaí to create a Pulse file incident report. It is, after all, eFlow’s system being duped and it must be in their interests to record the number of occasions this happens. And for that information to be shared with the public.
