Through a week in which Joe Biden’s re-election hopes seemed to crumble, Jill Biden has been at his side. At times, she’s appeared more than a resolute first lady, standing in as his compere, guide and primary political aide.
The president’s wife of 45 years – they met on a blind date, set up by Biden’s brother, in 1975 – may now hold the key to whether Biden accepts mounting pressure from Democrat party donors and abandons a faltering re-election bid or risks another debate with Donald Trump in September with even higher stakes.
For now, the bets are on him fighting on – and much of that comes down to Jill, who has emerged publicly as the power aside and not behind the throne. It was Jill who led her husband off the stage on Thursday night, and was heard to tell him, as a primary school teacher might, “Joe, you did such a great job! You answered every question, you knew all the facts!”
It was also Jill - professor of English - who introduced her husband at two rallies the following day and attempted to recast the debate fiasco as clash between her husband who had “told the truth,” and former president Trump who told “lie after lie after lie”.
At the opening of the Stonewall national monument visitor centre, marking the 1969 street rebellion that served as a catalyst for a generation of gay rights activism, she approached the debate’s aftermath head on.
“As Joe said earlier today, he’s not a young man. And after last night’s debate, he said, ‘You know, Jill, I don’t know what happened. I didn’t feel that great.’ And I said, ‘Look, Joe, we are not going to let 90 minutes define the four years that you’ve been president.’”
“What my husband does know how to do is tell the truth,” she continued. “When Joe gets knocked down, Joe gets back up, and that’s what we’re doing today.”
Jill attended every day of court in Delaware at her stepson Hunter’s recent criminal trial and conviction on a charge that he illegally purchased and possessed a gun while addicted to crack cocaine, including flying to France and back twice to attend D-Day commemorations with her husband.
It was to some a show of power in a small state where the Bidens have been the dominant political family for half a century; to others it was a show of unity in a family battered by addiction and tragedy.
Biden family bonds – it was reported last week that the former first lady Michelle Obama’s decision not to campaign for her husband’s vice president stems from the Biden family’s exile of Hunter’s ex-wife Kathleen Buhle, a close friend - point to a tightly held, almost nuclear, structure of concentric rings around a central power.
A glowing 2021 Vogue cover profile noted that the role she fulfils is “neither first lady nor professor but a key player in her husband’s administration, a West Wing surrogate and policy advocate”.
For all the get-up-and-fight-back bluster of the last 48 hours, real questions remain about whether Jill can continue to push her husband’s candidacy now that the White House veil around Biden’s apparent age-related infirmities is becoming harder to reposition.
The new focus on Jill, and the extent of her influence, almost by definition have a sexist quality – raising questions rarely asked in a reverse situation. But, as veteran Democratic party strategist Hank Sheinkopf told the Guardian last week, “the most logical person to suggest to Biden he not do this for his health and for the good of the country is Jill Biden”.
The New York Times’s Maureen Dowd predicted on Saturday that Jill and the White House staff “will build their protective wall ever higher” and push back on the age issue “ever more vigorously”.
“But Biden, Jill and Democratic leaders have to face the fact that this is an extraordinarily risky bet, with – as they drum into us – democracy on the line,” Dowd wrote, adding that the first lady “lacking the detachment of a Melania and enjoying the role of first lady more, has been pushing – and shielding – her husband, beyond a reasonable point”.
Some have gone further, Wyoming Republican congresswoman Harriet Hageman saying the president was so bad that Jill is guilty of “elder abuse” for “rolling President Biden out on stage to engage in a battle of wits while unarmed”. Biden has previously reacted furiously to that accusation.
Whichever decision the Bidens come to – and it appears they are already committed to one – it will be Jill who will be increasingly out front as her 81-year-old husband’s protector.
As Jill Biden’s communication director Elizabeth Alexander told the New York Times, “to say they’ve been in foxholes together doesn’t even begin to explain their bond”.
