Doug Emhoff wasn't always this way. He wasn't always the type to go around talking about how much he loves his wife, let alone quit his high-powered job to travel the country talking about how much he loves his wife.
In his first marriage, Doug Emhoff was more likely to throw himself into his work as a Los Angeles entertainment lawyer, play golf, sit on a couch, and watch sports on TV. A guy, devoting billable hours to a fight over the origins of the Taco Bell Chihuahua, otherwise not out to change the world.
His signature piece of life advice, still ringing in the ears of Cole and Ella, his two 20-something children named after Coltrane and Fitzgerald, is, naturally, about sports, any sport.
Emhoff, 56, is now showing the deftly supportive soft touch of a man in a second marriage of epic proportions. With Sen. Kamala Harris set to assume the vice presidency — the first woman, Black, and Asian American to do so — her husband, Doug, is about to take on his own place in history.
Emhoff will become the nation's first second gentleman, and, not for nothing, the first Jewish spouse of a president or vice president.
The son of Barb and Mike, a shoe designer, Emhoff was born in Brooklyn and raised in New Jersey. When he was still in high school, the Emhoffs decamped to the West Coast, where he later met then-Attorney General Harris, and the rest is Naval Observatory history.
"It's an amazing transformation for all of us to watch," said Los Angeles film producer Kerstin Emhoff, his ex-wife and mother of his children, who is finding her own unique footing in this emerging happily blended extended vice presidential family tableau. "He's not the political guy. He's just Doug."
Supportive husband
Cue the jokes about supportive Jewish husbands of more accomplished women — this is, perhaps, their moment, as more than a few have tweeted about, but Emhoff inhabits the role without irony or shtick. (Though Kamala cracked up a Manhattan audience with her imitation of her mother-in-law's New Jersey-by-way-of-Brooklyn accent.)
