Presidential Candidate Amy Klobuchar's Husband Could Be the First Gentleman

From Oprah Magazine

• Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar is one of many Democratic candidates running for president in 2020.

• She's been married to lawyer and legal scholar John Bessler for over 25 years.

The 2020 presidential election is fast approaching, and all eyes are currently on the Democratic candidates as they gear up for the second round of presidential debates. While you can brush up on what each politician aims to change here, we know that it's inevitable to want to learn more about their personal lives.

Enter John Bessler, the husband of Minnesota Senator and 2020 candidate Amy Klobuchar. If elected, she'd become the first female President of the United States, and Bessler—who she's been married to for 26 years—would become the First Gentleman. Of course, she's used to making history considering she became the first female Senator of Minnesota. Here's what to know about Bessler.

John Bessler is a lawyer and professor.

Currently, Bessler is an adjunct professor of law at Georgetown Law and he's an Associate Professor at the University of Baltimore School of Law. In addition, he is of counsel at Berens & Miller, a firm in Minneapolis.

As expected, he's very well educated. He has Bachelor of Arts in political science from the University of Minnesota, and he received his law degree at the Indiana University School of Law in Bloomington, where he served as the Senior Managing Editor of the Indiana Law Journal. He also has an MFA degree from Hamline University in St. Paul, Minnesota, and a master’s degree in International Human Rights Law from Oxford University.

At the University of Baltimore School of Law, where he's worked since 2009, he teaches courses in civil procedure, contracts, capital punishment, international human rights law, and lawyering skills, and became a tenured faculty member in 2014. He has also taught at the University of Minnesota Law School, the George Washington University Law School, where he specialized in death penalty issues, the Georgetown University Law Center, Rutgers School of Law, and the University of Aberdeen in Scotland. It's a family affair: His parents, Bill and Marilyn Bessler, both taught at Minnesota State University, according to the Mankato Free Press.

In 2018, he was a visiting scholar/research fellow at the Human Rights Center of the University of Minnesota Law School, and in that same year, received the University System of Maryland Board of Regents’ Faculty Award for Excellence in Scholarship, Research or Creative Activity.

John Bessler and Amy Klobuchar hail from Minnesota.

While Klobuchar comes from the suburbs of Minneapolis, Bessler comes from Mankato, Minnesota.

According to MPR News, Bessler and Klobuchar met at Coyote Cafe in Minneapolis and married a year later, in 1993. In July, they celebrated their 26th anniversary with a sweet Instagram post. Klobuchar wrote, "Happy anniversary John! On the day we got married we went canoeing in the morning. Thanks for being the kindest husband, a wonderful dad, a lot of fun and someone who always steers a steady canoe."

In addition, Klobuchar revealed how their proposal went down in another anniversary post on Facebook. "Happy 20th anniversary to my husband John! You're supposed to give china for the 20th, but I went with bookends in honor of his marriage proposal in the non-fiction aisle of the former Hungry Mind bookstore," she wrote in 2013. "Our wedding included a canoe trip for guests and a discounted cake from a bakery in the St. Paul bus depot (I said no to the plastic swans). Two decades later I still say no to the swans & yes to the guy. xox Amy"

Their daughter, Abigail Bessler, is 24.

The couple have a daughter, Abigail Bessler, who graduated from Yale in 2017. She works for a New York City councilman and, according to Vogue, is also a stand-up comedian.

According to Vogue, they live modest lives in Minneapolis and Washington, D.C., and Bessler is an involved political spouse as the first man to become a member of the Senate Spouse club. They commemorated their 25th wedding anniversary with an Instagram post in 2018:

He's also a published author.

Bessler has written or edited a total of 10 books, according to his University of Baltimore bio, six of which were on capital punishment, two on American law and its origins, one on the craft of writing, and a biography of eighteenth-century Italian philosopher Cesare Beccaria.

His most recent book, The Baron and the Marquis: Liberty, Tyranny, and the Enlightenment Maxim That Can Remake American Criminal Justice, was published in January 2019. He also edited Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer's 2016 book, Against the Death Penalty. His 2014 book, The Birth of American Law: An Italian Philosopher and the American Revolution, was the recipient of the 2015 Scribes Book Award, an annual award given out by The American Society of Legal Writers for "the best work of legal scholarship published during the previous year."

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