Dr. Jill Biden’s relentless pursuit of power

Jill Biden just gave the most cringe intro for Joe Biden after the debate:

“Joe you did such a great job .. What did Trump do? LIE..” 😳 pic.twitter.com/7Zhw6dMGBG

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Jill wasn’t always interested in the relentless pursuit of power — at least not according to her husband’s memoirs. In 1975, Joe, a grieving widower and freshman senator, was introduced to Jill by his brother Frank. “You’ll like her, Joe,” said Frank. “She’s not interested in politics.” Joe and Jill went on a date and their romance began. “She gave me back my life,” wrote Joe. “She made me feel normal again.” He proposed to her repeatedly — but Jill, a divorcée eight years his junior, demurred. She was a part-time model who wanted to pursue her own career in education. Joe eventually offered not to stand for re-election to the Senate if she agreed to marry him. To prove he meant it, he dialed the number of a reporter in order to announce that he would not be standing again. Jill cut off the call with her thumb, saying: “If I denied you your dream, I would not be marrying the man I fell in love with.” That’s the story anyway. A cynic might say she already had her eyes firmly on the prize.

Now in the White House, she’s often been criticized for putting herself at the forefront of her man’s administration. In 2021, she posted a picture of herself on social media, pen in hand, looking studious and important. “Prepping for the G7,” she wrote. At that summit, she appeared to form a bond with Carrie Johnson, another political wife often accused of meddling in key decisions.

According to Joe, his two sons, Beau and Hunter, who had lost their mother in a car crash, soon took to his second wife and called her “Mom.” “I consider her to be my mother as much as one can possibly imagine,” confirmed Hunter in his own memoir, Beautiful Things. Yet these heartwarming accounts of Biden familial togetherness were somewhat tarred last month, when Hunter’s criminal trial revealed text messages in which he had called his stepmother “entitled” and a “vindictive moron.”

Jill did pursue her career as an educator and has used her husband’s position to advance the causes she cares about. In 2021, as first lady of an America still reeling from the Covid pandemic, she successfully pushed for emergency funding to be granted to students who had been worst affected by school closures. But Dr. Jill’s own academic qualifications have been the subject of some doubt. Whoopi Goldberg may have once called for her to be America’s next surgeon-general, but the first lady is not a real doctor. She doesn’t even have a PhD, but an EdD, a doctorate in education, a famously easy degree which school administrators use to increase their salaries.

Her dissertation — or “executive position paper” — was littered with typos and non-sequiturs. On the first of more than 100 pages, she described a class in Delaware Technical Community College: “Three quarters of the class will be Caucasian; one quarter of the class will be African American; one seat will hold a Latino; and the remaining seats will be filled with students of Asian descent or non-resident aliens.”

Numbers are not her forte, clearly. She also proposed that a future school administration “may want to consider an eight-week study week.” After various conservative commentators teased her about these errors, her many allies on America’s pro–Democratic news channels rushed out to call their mockery misogynistic.

It’s true that, compared with her husband, Jill is a model of clarity and coherence. She does, however, commit the occasional faux pas. Speaking to a Hispanic conference in 2022, she praised “the diversity of this community, as distinct as the bodegas of the Bronx, as beautiful as the blossoms of Miami, and as unique as the breakfast tacos here in San Antonio.” The National Association of Hispanic Journalists issued a wounded response, urging the First Lady to “better understand the complexities of our people… We are not tacos.”

That must have hurt Jill, who prides herself on her normally impeccable political correctness. Her speeches are full of nods to the progressive orthodoxies of the twenty-first-century Democratic Party. At recent campaign events, she has struck a decidedly feminist note as she talks about the need to protect women from Republican attempts to restrict abortion. “When our bodies are on the line,” she says, “when our daughters’ futures are at stake, when our country and its freedom hang in the balance… It’s time we show them, once again, just what we can do!”

It’s funny, then, that today she seems to be standing in the way of America’s first woman president. After last week, a number of voices in the Democratic Party have begun calling for Biden to make way for Kamala Harris, his vice president. Harris may be less popular than Biden, runs the argument, but at least she doesn’t appear to be dying on the campaign trail. For now, however, Dr. Jill is refusing to listen. In her professional opinion, Joe is where he needs to be.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s UK magazine. Subscribe to the World edition here.