Doug Day Afternoon
It’s A SUNNY OCTOBER DAY, AND DOUG EMHOFF IS BACK in his native New Jersey for the first time as Second Gentleman of the United States. “It looks surprisingly the same, except this beautiful city walk we’re on, which is incredible,” he says, gesturing to a riverside pathway, which sits across from a set of dumpsters, a pile of old mattresses and an ambulance parking lot. “It really feels like home.”
Emhoff has just finished a long day of asking people how it’s going. First, he was at a Newark high school, asking students, “How’s it going? Going back to school?” He told the principal that they’ve “got it going on” with their high student vaccination rate. Then, after eating lunch at a picnic table outside a diner, he had come to this scenic path in Elizabeth to visit young environmental-cleanup workers and talk about the climate provisions of President Joe Biden’s Build Back Better plan. Emhoff walks abnormally slowly, his hands clasped at his belt, pretending to ignore the photographers crouching ahead of him. Occasionally, he
