There’s a lot going on in American politics these days, but one of the funniest things is the status of Doug Imhoff, the husband of Kamala Harris, the Democratic Party’s candidate in the US presidential race, who, if she wins, will be the President of the US.
So what exactly is Mr. Imhoff’s situation?
Kamala, born to an Indian mother and a Jamaican father, married Imhoff in 2014; they are childless, but he has two sons from a prior marriage. Imhoff works as a lawyer, and when Harris became Joe Biden’s running mate in 2020, he quit his legal work at major corporations to prevent conflict of interest.
No one cared about him or his work until this July, when Biden dropped out of the race, and Kamala became candidate in his place – a strange paradox because the vice president replaces him according to the US Constitution if the presidential position becomes vacant, completing the remainder of the presidential term without holding elections.
This is what happened when Vice President Lyndon Johnson replaced President John F. Kennedy after his assassination in 1963.
It is an unusual occurrence for a vice president to assume the role of a presidential candidate.
In the past, the vice president has been a candidate after the president, but this was in cases where the president had finished his term and vacated the White House, as in the case of Biden and Obama.
However, in the case of Biden and Kamala; the former entered the race, then left out of necessity, and the latter assumed his position.
If Harris wins the elections, her husband’s case will be unique in the White House because no woman has ever taken office before as president.
Media outlets have already said that if she wins, her husband will adopt the title of ‘Mr. First,’ mirroring the term ‘First Lady’.
Locally, when Nawal al-Saadawi announced her intention to run against Mubarak in the 2005 presidential race, there was this amusing debate about the status of her husband, Sherif Hatata, if she won and became entitled to live in the presidential palace.
The world knows countless examples of husbands living in the shadows of their wives.
Perhaps the most famous is Prince Philip, who spent half a century in the palace, living in the shadow of Queen Elizabeth II, his wife. He was known for driving cars at insane speeds while she was beside him, and if she got fed up, he threatened to open the door and drop her off on the road.
And it seems that this attitude came from him being fed up with living in the shadow of his wife for far too long.
