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At rallies, Joe Biden often speaks after his wife. “My name is Joe Biden and I’m Jill’s husband,” he begins. It’s a line he has used for years — a faux humble joke about how much more impressive she is. These days, however, it sounds more like an admission of the real pecking order.
In the past week, we’ve seen the extent to which Dr. Jill Biden (as she insists on being called) has taken charge of her ailing spouse’s collapsing campaign. This week, she appeared on the cover of Vogue, looking imperious in a white tuxedo dress. “We will decide our future!” shouts the quote headline. That’s a very royal “we,” isn’t it?
After that painful presidential debate last Thursday, as Donald Trump strolled off stage left, Jill took the humiliated Joe by the hand and led him gingerly down the steps. The pair then went to an event with fans at an Atlanta hotel. “Joe you did such a great job!” shouted Jill as the commander-in-chief stood by her grinning feebly. “You answered every question!” She was slightly more candid with Vogue. “[We] will not let those ninety minutes define the four years he’s been president,” she said, when asked about the debate. “We will continue to fight.”
Sources close to the Bidens have long said that Jill is the one person who can persuade Joe to stand down. “The only person who has ultimate influence with him is the first lady,” says an insider. For now, however, even as a growing number of Biden’s supporters say he ought to do the honorable thing and resign ahead of the Democratic National Convention in August, Jill seems ever more determined to cling on. The First Lady is not for turning.
‘We will not let those ninety minutes define the four years he’s been president. We will continue to fight’
Jill tends to brush over the evident reality — that Joe’s body and brain are breaking down — with saccharine statements about the nobility of his soul. “I want you to hear Joe’s words,” she tells her audiences. “But most of all I want you to listen to his heart.”
If it all sounds a bit desperate that’s because it is. The Biden inner circle has taken to attacking fellow Democrats who are not keeping the faith and doubling down on their insistence that Biden is the only man who can beat Trump.
“The bedwetting brigade is calling for Joe Biden to ‘drop out,’” said deputy campaign manager Rob Flaherty at the end of last week. “That is the best possible way for Donald Trump to win and us to lose. Joe Biden is going to be the Democratic nominee, period. End of story.” It’s widely rumored that Jill is the driving force behind this defiance. The Daily Caller, a mischievous right-wing website, now calls her “Lady Mac-Biden.”
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.
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