While Kamala Harris makes history as the first female American Vice President, her husband Doug Emhoff is making history, too. We’ve never had a “Second Gentleman” in the White House, but it turns out that the people closest to him may not actually refer to him by that honorary title. So, what will be the secret nickname or code name for Doug Emhoff?
The history of the media assigning nicknames to huge political figures isn’t without its success. Although it feels like it never really caught on, there was a period where papers like The New York Post insisted on calling Obama “Bam,” a time which feels way more innocent and easy than the decade we’ve only just started living in. Correlatively, longtime political speechwriter and comedian Mark Katz tells a great story about the greatest stolen joke of all time: “Al Gore is so boring that the Secret Service’s codename for him is AL GORE.”
So, what’s the equivalent down-to-Earth name for Doug Emhoff? In a new interview on CNN, Vice President-elect Harris laughed off people calling Doug “the second dude,” and admitted that “some of his friends might call him that.”
“Well, I think that the term has evolved into the second gentleman,” Kamala Harris reaffirmed, but also said that she won’t call her husband by either term. “No, I’ll call him honey,” Harris said.
Politicians might not be exactly like us, but it’s nice to find moments where it seems like they might be. For a ton of stay-at-home dads, what Doug does next as the Second Dude would be helpful. We haven’t had a role model like this in the White House before. It’s comforting to think he and Kamala are more like us than some of their…err…predecessors.
