“Hey, Dr. Biden, how are you—how’re you doing?” the driver of a Teamsters Local 633 pickup truck called out cheerfully to Jill Biden, Ed.D., one day this fall when she was campaigning for her husband in New Hampshire. The other occupants of the truck offered similar greetings. In recent days, the soon-to-be First Lady’s use of the title “Dr.” has inspired an unaccountable spate of anger on the right. In a Wall Street Journal opinion piece, Joseph Epstein wrote that it “sounds and feels fraudulent, not to say a touch comic.” Tucker Carlson, on Fox, called her “poor, illiterate Jill Biden.” Yet the Teamsters, like any number of people whom Biden has encountered in the political world and in academia over the years, had no problem using the honorific. (The community-college students she teaches call her Dr. B.) The only novel aspect of the encounter in New Hampshire came when she gestured to a man standing next to her and asked, “You met Doug, right? Everybody met Doug?”
They had met Doug Emhoff, the husband of Vice-President-elect Kamala Harris, and many more Americans will get to know him in the weeks leading up to her swearing in, alongside Joe Biden’s, on January 20th. When Biden announced his selection of Harris as his running mate, he said that Emhoff would be a “barrier-breaker” as the first Second Gentleman of the United States. He will also be the first Jewish person to be a Second (or First) Spouse, and he and Harris will be the first interracial couple in their position. And yet, if Emhoff is an unconventional figure, it is mostly because his wife is one on a more historic scale: the first woman and the first Black or South Asian person elected to the Vice-Presidency. The reactions to Jill Biden and Doug Emhoff raise different, if related, questions. In her case, it’s how her simple wish to be known by a title she earned could excite such fury. For Emhoff, it’s what it means to say that a successful, white corporate lawyer still has new barriers to break.
One explanation for the scorn directed at Jill Biden is that our political culture is so unhinged that anybody close to a President-elect gets pelted with whatever material is available, whether it makes sense or not. Michelle Obama, after all, was attacked for wanting to plant a vegetable garden. During the Obama Administration, she and Jill teamed up to create Joining Forces, an initiative that offers support to military families—as bipartisan a project as one could imagine. The incoming Administration disabled its Web site within hours of Trump’s Inauguration; Jill Biden plans to revive it. (Emhoff has said that he is considering working on food insecurity or access to the justice system.)
But women’s experience of first having their credentials ignored and then being mocked if they assert them is all too familiar, in almost every arena. That is doubly true for women of color; Harris is a U.S. senator and a former attorney general of California, but Donald Trump has portrayed her as pushy, dislikable, and alien, drawing on the most tedious racist and sexist tropes. “Ka-maala. Kamala,” he said at a rally in October, mangling each syllable. “You know, if you don’t pronounce her name exactly right, she gets very angry at you.”
Nor is it incidental that both Epstein and Carlson suggested that the topic of Biden’s dissertation, which has what Epstein called an “unpromising title”—it’s “Student Retention at the Community College: Meeting Students’ Needs”—was piddling. If anything, that topic is more urgent than ever. Last month, a study by the National Student Clearinghouse found that community-college enrollment had fallen, in the course of the pandemic, by almost ten per cent; among underrepresented minorities, that number is close to thirty per cent. Community colleges provide a route to the middle class for people who are low income, the first in their family to attend college, immigrants, single parents, or all of the above. When Joe Biden was Vice-President, Jill Biden taught at Northern Virginia Community College, becoming the first known sitting Second Lady to hold a full-time paid job. She has written that it was easy for her Secret Service agents to blend in at the college, because the average age of the students was twenty-eight. Her plan is to teach as First Lady, too.
Emhoff will also be teaching, in his case a course on entertainment law at Georgetown University. (“Just call him professor Doug Emhoff,” a story in People began, though he will technically be a lecturer—a reminder that titles come more easily in some cases than in others.) He is leaving behind a partnership at the international law firm DLA Piper. Still, in terms of qualifications, he is not an outlier. Since 1993, every First and Second Spouse, with the exception of Melania Trump, has had an advanced degree: a master’s (Tipper Gore, Laura Bush, Karen Pence), a J.D. (Hillary Clinton, Michelle Obama), or a Ph.D. (Lynne Cheney). Emhoff was involved in litigation surrounding the Taco Bell Chihuahua; Michelle Obama once protected the intellectual property of Barney the Dinosaur. The “traditional” picture has long been outdated; perhaps an advantage of being a gentleman, rather than a lady, is not being told to pretend otherwise.
Harris and Emhoff found each other relatively late in life, when both were in their forties. She had not been married before; he was divorced, and his two children call Harris “Momala.” (Stepparents are not new in First and Second Families; the list includes not only Jill Biden but Melania Trump, Nancy Reagan—and George Washington.) Emhoff has said that his role is not to be Harris’s adviser but to “support her.” His useful message is that supporting can be an act of strength, for a man as well as for a woman.
Emhoff has won praise and ardent fans for doing something that should not be extraordinary: expressing pride in his wife’s achievements. O, The Oprah Magazine, after reviewing Emhoff’s social-media posts—photographs of Harris next to an airport shop display that includes a book she wrote, of a TV screen on which an interview of her is playing, and of himself wearing a Harris campaign hoodie—declared him to be “the ultimate hype-man we all deserve in a partner.” That is as good a summation as any of the aspiration for ordinary decency—something that has often seemed out of reach in Trump’s Washington. Perhaps Emhoff’s radical task is to remind people that respect for a woman’s career and credentials can be something quite normal. He can always ask Dr. Jill Biden for advice. ♦
A previous version of this article inaccurately summarized the ways in which Kamala Harris’s ascendancy to the Vice-Presidency is historically novel.
