The Wife Guy Convention
8 min read
She’s everything. He’s just Doug.
Don’t take it from me—that’s his official title. Here at the United Center in Chicago, state delegates at the Democratic National Convention are given placards to wave during the speeches. The first night was dominated by We Love Joe and Union Yes!, interspersed with the campaign’s battle-cry: We Fight, We Win.
For the speech by the second gentleman, however, the signs simply read DOUG.
That reflects Doug Emhoff’s public persona, as a sort of Ringo-esque goofball who merits first-name terms—he just seems like a Doug, with its overtones of solid Gen X dependability. The familiarity also gestured to Emhoff’s potential to be a quietly transformative figure in American politics: Female ambition is now the stuff of a million power breakfasts and lapel badges, but if Kamala Harris becomes America’s first female president, her husband will break the real “hardest glass ceiling” in American politics. Behold, a man who is content to be the supporting actor in someone else’s drama.
The politics of gender—and race—are the inevitable backdrop to this year’s convention. During the honorary roll call on Tuesday night, several delegates mentioned their pride at nominating a woman of color. During the speeches, Shirley Chisholm’s name was regularly invoked, as the first woman and first Black American to seek the presidential nomination from one of the two major parties. In the corridors of the United Center, delegates could buy sugar-pink “Madam President” T-shirts. “Sixty years ago, Fannie Lou Hamer came to this convention in 1964, and was denied entry to sit as a delegate, because she was a Black woman,” the actor Wendell Pierce, who came with the Louisiana delegation, told me on the convention floor. “To think that 60 years later, we just nominated a Black woman to lead the party, that is a tribute to that legacy.”
Yet Harris’s campaign has so far left it to others to present her as a history-making proposition, presumably because they think that the idea alienates some voters—and leaves many more unmoved. Let the right obsess about the cultural implications of rampaging, untameable hordes of childless women, the thinking seems to go, while we get back to talking about how Donald Trump is a convicted felon.
Arguments about race and gender have been handled by carefully chosen surrogates. On the first night, Hillary Clinton gave a well-received personal speech about the advances made by women in her lifetime, starting with her mother’s birth in an era when women could not yet vote in the United States. Oprah Winfrey spoke about the first children to go to desegregated schools, and how they paved the way for the young Kamala, the daughter of a Jamaican father and an Indian mother. Michelle Obama, meanwhile, gave one of the angriest, most straightforwardly political speeches she has ever delivered, unleashing a stream of barely veiled attacks on Trump—condemning the “affirmative action of generational wealth,” and those who see a mountain ahead of them and “expect there to be an escalator to take them to the top.”
The Democratic desire to tread lightly around gender can also be seen in the convention’s treatment of abortion—a significant mover of votes in the midterms—which has consistently been framed as a men’s issue too. That reads like an attempt to turn abortion rights from a radical feminist demand into an everyday issue of freedom and family. The first night featured Josh Zurawski talking alongside his wife, Amanda, about her difficulty in accessing medical treatment for a miscarriage because of Texas’s draconian laws. The couple was followed by Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear addressing the same theme, which was also part of his successful reelection campaign last year. Headlining the third night, Harris’s running mate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, talked about fertility treatments, and reused one of the most popular lines from his stump speech, advising Republicans to “mind your own damn business.”
The official launch of Brand Doug and the Emhoff family has an obvious aim: to normalize the idea of a female president with a supportive husband. “So you want to hear about Doug?” Arizona delegate Joshua Polacheck said, when I entered the scrum on the convention floor ahead of Emhoff’s speech. We had just heard Chuck Schumer speak, and Polacheck was disappointed that the Senate majority leader had missed the opportunity for a joke. “As a Jewish boy myself, I thought he was going to say … if you dream big, one day, as a nice Jewish boy, you can be the first gentleman of the United States.”
The unspoken backdrop to that joke is an online right that is obsessed with emasculation. Listen to enough manosphere podcasts, or watch enough TikToks, and you will become familiar with a whole set of anxieties—falling sperm counts, low testosterone levels, male status hierarchies—with a whole vocabulary to match. (Been mogged by a sigma? Try looksmaxxing and don’t be a cuck.) The advances made by women in the last few decades have made some men feel unheard and left behind, and have convinced many teenage boys that it’s their sex that gets a raw deal. The Republican convention, just a few weeks ago, offered a buffet of macho role models, such as the wrestler Hulk Hogan, singer Kid Rock, and UFC boss Dana White. At the podium in Chicago, both Winfrey and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg mentioned the Republican vice-presidential candidate J. D. Vance’s cruel comments about “childless cat ladies,” drawing applause from the floor. “As a trans woman, I certainly fall outside of the traditional gender binary,” New Jersey delegate Joeigh Perella told me. “Womanhood is not determined about whether or not [a person] can have children, or if they do have children.”
To counteract the gender gap in polling, which sees men prefer Trump to Harris by double digits, the Democrats are pushing their own model of masculinity: the dude who is relaxed and secure enough to take pride in his wife’s achievements. The left has developed its own phrase book, of wife guys and girl dads, to communicate the virtue of being proud of the women around you. Among the foremost qualities of a political dad, whether of girls or boys, is his ability to take a joke: Witness Walz’s kids doing bunny ears behind him on the first night, or Barack Obama ribbing him about his flannel shirts. (The shirts “don’t come from some consultant, they come from his closet, and they’ve been through some stuff,” Obama said, while Gwen Walz nodded in the cutaways.) Dads do not fear mockery, because they live to embarrass their children, preferably by dancing in public. Dads have nothing to prove. Dads hug.
In a similar vein, Tuesday night was the domain of the Alpha Wife Guy—men who have achieved enough themselves to be able to revel in their partner’s successes. Barack Obama famously watched his wife write two bestselling books while he struggled to finish one after leaving office. “I am the only person stupid enough to speak after Michelle Obama,” he observed on Tuesday. (In case you think it was all high-minded feminism, Obama also made a joke at Trump’s expense, when he said the former president was obsessed with . . . crowd sizes.) Emhoff, meanwhile, used to be a Los Angeles entertainment lawyer, but gave it up when Harris became vice-president to avoid conflicts of interest. He now teaches law at Georgetown University. “He exemplifies what all men should do: When your lady needs to take the lead, let her take the lead,” Pierce told me. “He’s emblematic of what good men are.”
To offset any suggestion that he might be a henpecked homebody, Emhoff’s speech referenced his childhood buddies, his fantasy football league, and his group chat. “It’s probably blowing up right now,” he said. The video before his speech zoomed in on his face in footage showing him grabbing a protester who had taken the mic from Harris at a live event. In his speech, Walz adopted the same tone, boasting about being a good shot, comparing his words to a football “pep talk,” and exiting to a Neil Young song. As he spoke, the audience waved signs that read: Coach Walz.
Apart from its specifically masculine touches, the second gentleman’s speech closely followed the classic first lady template. Mindful of the bad headlines suffered by Hillary Clinton for her wide-ranging interest in politics, first ladies since have tended to limit their interventions to a single issue. Laura Bush picked education, Michelle Obama focused on childhood nutrition, and, with no apparent self-awareness, Melania Trump launched a short-lived anti-bullying campaign. Since the Hamas attacks on Israel last October and the wave of protests that followed, Emhoff has spoken out on anti-Semitism. Some Jewish delegates expressed their approval by waving First Mensch signs during his speech.
He hit the other beats, too: humanize the candidate with behind-the-scenes anecdotes, tell your love story, and claim that despite running for office, your spouse believes that their most important job will always be as a parent. (Pause for audience to dab eyes.) “She’s always been there for our children,” Emhoff told the audience about his wife, “and I know she’ll always be there for yours too.”
Theirs is a “blended family,” a set-up that is far from unusual in modern America, but clearly triggering to some on the right, even though Trump has a blended family, too. Despite the painful circumstances of Emhoff’s divorce, his first wife is now enough of a friend that she has produced a campaign advertisement for him, narrated by their son. All the Emhoffs—Kerstin, Cole, and Ella—have been present at the convention to support Doug. And in writing that sentence, I just realized something else—that it’s important to notice the dog that doesn’t bark. Three decades after Hillary Rodham agonized over taking her husband’s name, absolutely no one seems to care that Kamala Harris isn’t an Emhoff. Underneath all the sound and fury, an idea that was once considered radical has slipped into silent acceptance.
