New VP’s series of firsts for US
Kamala Harris and her husband made history of their own yesterday when she was sworn in as America’s vice-president.
Harris, 56, became the first woman and the first person of South Asian descent to reach such a lofty position of power in America, as well as being the first black vice-president.
The choreography underlined the significance of her ascent for women and minority groups.
Eugene Goodman, the black police officer praised for diverting the mob away from the Senate chamber during the attack on the United States Capitol two weeks ago, escorted Harris to the platform for her inauguration.
She then placed her hand on a Bible that once belonged to Thurgood Marshall, a hero of the civil rights movement who became the first black Supreme Court justice.
She gave her oath of office to Sonia Sotomayor, the first Latina Supreme Court justice, who was herself nominated 11 years ago by the first black president, Barack Obama.
The new vice-president’s husband, Doug Emhoff, looked on proudly but he too was breaking new ground in that moment. The former entertainment lawyer, also 56, has become the first Jewish person in the quartet of president, vice-president and their spouses and is expected to continue to provide a link between the White House and Jewish groups and donors, much as he did between them and the Biden-Harris campaign last year.
More obviously, Emhoff is the first male spouse of an American president or vice-president.
That honour might have belonged to Bill Clinton had Hillary Clinton defeated Donald Trump in 2016, or to John Zaccaro, the husband of Geraldine Ferraro, the first woman on a presidential ticket back in 1984, when she was the running-mate of Walter Mondale. The pair were trampled in President Ronald Reagan’s re-election landslide.
So it falls instead to Emhoff to reset Americans’ expectations of who a political spouse at the top of the country’s power structure can be.
He was set up with Harris by a mutual friend in 2013, when she was attorney-general of California and he was a well-established lawyer in Los Angeles with a focus on trademark disputes and intellectual property.
They were married the following year.
It was her first marriage and his second.
His first wife, Kerstin Emhoff, is a film producer based in LA who has become good friends with Harris. The two children of the first Emhoff marriage, Cole and Ella, are also close to their stepmother, whom they call ‘‘Momala’’, a melding of her name and a Yiddish word for ‘‘little mother’’. They call their father by his first name.
‘‘Doug and Kamala together are like almost vomit-inducingly cute and coupley,’’ Cole, 26, told The New York Times this week.
‘‘It’s like the honeymoon phase for ever,’’ added Ella, 21. ‘‘The rest of the world gets to see it on social media but we live that.’’
Emhoff put his law career on hold to support his wife’s tilt at the presidency in 2019 and then her campaign on the Biden ticket last year.
He has since resigned from his law firm and is due to take up a post teaching entertainment law as a visiting lecturer at Georgetown University Law Centre in Washington.