If anyone can convince US President Joe Biden to make a graceful exit, it’s his wife of 47 years. But for anxious Democrats hoping Jill Biden will take the initiative, don’t hold your breath.
Joe Biden has been a politician for five decades. Jill Biden has been by his side for almost that long. And since his mother Catherine “Jean” Finnegan Biden passed away in 2010, she has been the matriarch of the extended Biden family.
There hasn’t been a closer-knit presidential family since the Kennedys. In addition to the first lady, they include Valerie Biden Owens, 78, the president’s younger sister and his longtime political adviser who ran several of his presidential and Senate campaigns, and her son Hunter. They are the triumvirate of decision makers in the Biden family.
But Jill is her husband’s biggest and most loyal defender. As someone who has studied first ladies, I wasn’t at all surprised that she had been their most vocal supporter in the days since the disastrous presidential debate. Her main message? This too shall pass.
“Joe is not just the right person for the job. He’s the only person for the job,” she declared at a fundraiser on Long Island on Saturday, two days after Biden’s disastrous debate performance that put his re-election bid in jeopardy.
She was most blunt at an LGBT+ fundraiser at New York’s Stonewall National Monument when she admitted the obvious because, as she told the crowd, “I know what’s on your minds.”
“As Joe said earlier today, he is not a young man,” she said. “And you know, after last night’s debate, he said, ‘You know, Jill, I don’t know what happened. I didn’t feel very good.’ And I said, ‘Look, Joe, we’re not going to let 90 minutes define the four years you’ve been president.’”
Every president ages dramatically in office; even a young President Barack Obama came out with gray hair. The weight of the presidency’s responsibility must have some effect.
Biden will turn 82 in November and, if reelected, will be 86 at the end of his second term. Jill is so protective of her husband that I think the only thing that would make her tell him to leave is if she really thought the position was causing serious harm to his health.
Unless that’s the case, she has as much interest in the game as her husband. Jill Biden believes there is no one else who can defeat former President Donald Trump, who poses a serious threat to democracy.
Melania Trump is nowhere to be found as her husband campaigns for the Republican presidential nomination. Jill, on the other hand, is running across the country in a dress decorated with the word “Vote.”
Jill is more like other first ladies than her predecessor. She is his strongest campaign supporter and, à la Nancy Reagan, is her husband’s fiercest protector.
But unlike Nancy Reagan, who operated mostly behind the scenes, she’s not concerned with letting people see how strong she can be.
In 2020, we saw Jill Biden, flanked by Biden campaign senior adviser Symone Sanders, insert herself between her husband and two protesters who separately ran toward him at a rally in Los Angeles. Sanders actually wrapped his arms around one of the women.
“We’re fine,” Jill said after the protesters were led away, clapping as if nothing had happened. “We are fine.” In other words, the show must go on.
A month earlier, at a rally in New Hampshire, she calmly walked toward a man who was yelling at her husband and approaching the lectern where he was speaking.
She placed her hands on his shoulders, turned him around, and redirected him off the stage. She smiled as she returned to his seat. When reporters asked about the incident, she laughed and said, “I’m a good Philly girl”—by which she presumably meant that she’s tough as nails.
Behind the scenes, her Nancy Reagan quality shines through. After the president got mixed up during a nearly two-hour press conference in January 2022, Jill asked his aides, “Why didn’t anyone stop this?”
Jill Biden will be the last person to tell her husband to leave, although her debate performance only served to confirm Democrats’ worst fears.
A CBS News/YouGov poll released Sunday showed that 72% of registered voters do not think Biden is up to the task, up from 65% earlier this month.
Just like at the 2022 press conference, Biden’s family reportedly blamed campaign aides as they gathered at Camp David over the weekend, even suggesting he fire some of them for not preparing him well.
Advisors say he was ill and overprepared, but in the end the president is solely responsible.
Jill Biden is also on the cover of Vogue’s August issue. In the accompanying article, she tells the reporter what every first lady — with the exception, one suspects, of Melania Trump — is proud of. They are the go-betweens between their husbands and the American people.
“Jill Biden, I begin to suspect, doesn’t want to talk about her feelings. Less out of self-protection than out of conviction that, at this moment, in this context, her feelings are not the point,” writes journalist Maya Singer in the Vogue article.
“The American people are the point. She’s quick to turn the camera, so to speak, as if to say — don’t look at me; look at what I see.”
What she sees is a country that cannot risk another four years of Trump in charge.
Jill Biden is not an anomaly. First ladies are often much more involved in the wheels of their husbands’ presidencies than most people realize.
And not just Hillary Clinton and Nancy Reagan. When I interviewed Rosalynn Carter in 2015, she was still bitter about her husband’s loss to Ronald Reagan. Nearly 40 years later, the stigma of a one-term presidency has stayed with her.
When she was asked decades after leaving Washington what she missed most about living in the White House, she responded: “I miss having Jimmy in the Oval Office taking care of our country. I never felt safer than when he was there.”
Even years later, in a 1999 interview with the New York Times, Rosalynn said, “My biggest regret in life was that Jimmy was defeated.” Betty Ford felt the same pain of defeat after her husband lost to Carter in 1976.
President Carter, of course, ended up having the longest post-White House career of any president — and Rosalynn was a crucial part of his success. Joe Biden, however, does not have decades to lead a prosperous post-presidential career.
Lady Bird Johnson earned the nickname “Mrs. Vice President” among the press when the vice presidency was vacant and before her husband nominated Hubert Humphrey, a U.S. senator from Minnesota, to the position. She even wrote her husband’s speeches.
In May 1964, a few months after President John F. Kennedy’s assassination, Lady Bird wrote a nine-page memo to her husband about his political future. The Vietnam War was raging and he needed her help as his closest and most loyal advisor.
Lady Bird wrote an announcement, ending the memo by suggesting that four years in the future—in February or March 1968—he would tell the country “that he is not a candidate for re-election.” Of course, he followed her advice.
Biden is in a very different position, running against a convicted felon. Jill Biden is not going to suggest that he give up and potentially — at least in her mind — hand the presidency to Trump.
*Editor’s note: Kate Andersen Brower is the author of “First Women: The Grace & Power of America’s Modern First Ladies” and “The Residence: Inside the Private World of the White House.” The opinions expressed in this article are her own.
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