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As confidence in Joe Biden’s ability to lead the country wanes among both Democrats and the public, the president has a ballast behind-the-scenes attempting to keep his re-election bid on course: Jill Biden.
Biden’s disastrous performance at the first debate of the 2024 election against Donald Trump thrust his mental fitness into the limelight. Within the past week, three senior Democrats have either publicly called on the president to stand aside or announced he would lose the election, and Trump now has a six-point lead in the latest The Wall Street Journal poll.
The 73-year-old first lady, however, has publicly painted a rosy picture of her husband’s performance. “Joe you did such a great job,” Dr. Biden proclaimed in the immediate aftermath last Thursday, before adding: “You answered every question!”
In the days since, she has remained steadfast — both in public and in private — in her belief that he should remain in the race.
“[We] will not let those 90 minutes define the four years he’s been president,” Biden told Vogue after reflecting on the debate debacle.
By Tuesday, Dr. Biden was by the president’s side as he campaigned in Pennsylvania, smiling and engaging with the crowd, Rep Nanette Barragan told NBC News.
“I couldn’t see anything that would tell me that something was happening and something else was going on,” she said in the aftermath of the debate.
Democratic party strategist Hank Sheinkopf recently told the Guardian that the first lady is in the prime position to dissuade Biden from running due to health concerns.
Instead, she is steering her husband to act as a roadblock to prevent the “chaos” of another Trump presidency.
To the dismay of some Democrats, the first lady continues to spur the president to stay in the race. A person close to the family told CNN “there is no change,” since the debate, adding that “the first lady is all in. The family’s all in”.
The educator is credited for stitching Biden’s life back together after he lost his wife Neila Hunter Biden and daughter Naomi in a car crash in 1972. Youngest son Hunter quickly called her “mom,” he wrote in his memoir, Beautiful Things. She met the grieving then-Delaware senator on a blind date in 1975.
Almost five decades on, Biden remains smitten. “My name is Joe Biden and I’m Jill’s husband,” he frequents at campaign rallies.
Along with being a bedrock of the president’s private life, the first lady remains the key person of influence outside of Biden’s close-knit group of senior advisers.
“She has been the most ardent and fervent supporter, campaigner, surrogate, defender, and protector than anyone around him, and clearly has tremendous influence,” Anita McBride, former first lady Laura Bush’s ex-chief of staff, told Reuters.
While his aides say “‘we need this’ or ‘we need that,’” Dr. Biden told NBC, she presents the world’s problems as “stories.”
“I tell him what I’m seeing, what I’m hearing — and he gets it. And this is where the magic happens,” she told Vogue.
The 2024 election marks the fourth time Dr. Biden has helped her husband campaign for the top job after losing to Michael Dukakis in 1987 and Barack Obama in 2008, before he took office in 2020.
She is now confronted with a difficult task: convincing disgruntled Democrats they should stand by her husband, declaring to group of party donors in New York on Saturday that he’s “the only person for the job.”
On Sunday, Dr. Biden, Hunter and the president’s grandchildren convened at Camp David to further shift the blame away from the president, instead pointing the finger at his senior aides, a source told The New York Times.
“The family is scared. These advisers are incredibly loyal and doing their jobs,” a senior Democrat contested to NBC News on Thursday.
White House chief of staff Jeff Zients also retorted that “the president and first lady have full confidence in their team,” he told the outlet. “There is absolutely no truth to these unfounded and insulting rumors.”
The first lady’s staff have also been quick to quash puppeteering claims.
“As much as any husband and wife team make decisions together that impact their lives, they absolutely do, but as she’s said more times than I can count — politics is his lane,” Elizabeth Alexander, Dr. Biden’s communications director, told Reuters.
