Jill Biden has the fate of the world in her hands
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Now might be a good time for Dr Jill Biden, the First Lady, to have a rummage around in the back of the wardrobe for one particular item of clothing. When Joe Biden opted against running for president in 2004, his decision was underlined by his wife’s decision to wear a halter top with the word “NO” scrawled on her stomach.
Following her husband’s geriatric performance against Donald Trump in Thursday night’s debate, many Democrats are hoping she will now take the same line on her husband’s decision to run for a second term. It may well be that she is the only person who can now prevent Trump romping to victory in November.
In the modern era, neither the Republicans nor the Democrats have tried to force an election candidate to step down. Their rules make it almost impossible to do so. The only person that can take Mr Biden’s name off the ticket is the president himself.
The US president has already secured the presumptive Democratic nomination and is understood to be a stubborn man. According to those who know the president best, the voice Mr Biden is most likely to heed on this matter is that of his wife.
Dr Biden has been described as her husband’s greatest political asset. There’s a credible argument that, for the next few days at least, she is the most powerful person in the free world.
Can she persuade her husband that, after 52 years as a politician, he should perform one last act of sacrifice for the republic and that this might be the surest way of securing his legacy? Those who know the couple say their marriage is built on mutual respect and admiration. Both are believed to take each other’s counsel seriously.
The couple got married in 1977, but only after Joe had popped the question five times. Biden’s first wife, Neilia, died in a 1972 car crash along with their daughter Naomi. “I saw in him then the same character that I see in him today and even though he has faced unimaginable tragedies, his optimism is undaunted,” Dr Biden told at a campaign rally on Friday. “His strength is unshakeable, his hope is undeterred.”
In her book Where the Light Enters, Dr Biden writes about standing by her husband in a similar situation to that which he now faces: “As a political spouse, I’ve found that my stoicism often serves me well. In 1988, when Joe’s first presidential campaign started to look bleak, people were constantly looking for cracks in our team. We all felt scrutinised, but I refused to show weakness.”
She also revealed how Joe liked to drive his boys to school, the three of them singing along to the radio, including one of their favourites: the Helen Reddy hit You and Me Against the World. Beau, the elder son and former attorney general of Delaware, died from brain cancer in 2015 when Mr Biden was vice-president to Barack Obama.
The First Lady is fiercely protective of a family that has weathered so much tragedy. She must now decide whether the best way to protect her husband is by backing him to the hilt or urging him not to make a mistake.
Jill Jacobs was still a college student when she met Joe and liked “living under the radar”. One of the reasons she turned down Joe’s initial proposals was because it would mean “a life in the spotlight that I had never wanted”.
She has since become an accomplished public performer. But her prior inclinations may mean she is more likely than those political spouses who are attracted to the trappings of power to bring down the curtain on her husband’s career.
Down-to-earth and with a penchant for practical jokes, Dr Biden is a professor with a doctorate in educational leadership and taught at Northern Virginia Community College. She became the first First Lady to hold a paying job during her husband’s time in office, demonstrating there was a life beyond the White House security fence.
According to her biographer Darlene Superville, Dr Biden “sees herself as a teacher – more perhaps than she sees herself as a First Lady”. Anita McBride, a former chief-of-staff to First Lady Laura Bush, adds: “She has combined what has been seen as a traditional role while serving as a model of being an independent person with her own agenda and own career.”
For the time being, Dr Biden, who is nine years younger than her husband, is sticking to the script. At the end of the debate on Thursday night, she took to the stage to rev up the audience: “Joe, you did such a good job,” she said. “You answered every question, you knew all the facts.”
Speaking at a rally in North Carolina the morning after, Dr Biden was still in full-bore campaigning mode: “There is no one that I would rather have sitting in the Oval Office right now than my husband,” she said. “What you saw last night on the debate stage was Joe Biden, a president with integrity and character, who told the truth. And Donald Trump told lie after lie after lie.”
Her speech was persuasive. “Jill Biden… knows [Thursday] night was bad per [people] familiar and is also nowhere near the conclusion some Dem[ocrat]s have suggested she should reach,” tweeted Katie Rogers, the White House correspondent for the New York Times. “Today’s appearance makes that very obvious.”
But the First Lady’s loyalty puts her in a shrinking minority. At the start of the debate, PredictIt, an online betting market, gave Trump a 53 per cent chance of winning the election in November. By the end, his chances had shot up to 61 per cent.
Biden is, at 81, just three years older than Trump. But, following the debate, one political commentator suggested it looked more like 30 years. Polls already showed voters were worried Biden was too old for four more years in the White House. Now questions are being asked about the next four months.
There are certainly precedents for an incumbent to step aside. As Vietnam War protests mounted in 1968, President Lyndon Johnson decided not to seek re-nomination for a second full term. But, crucially, the call was the president’s. That remains the case with Biden. “Only one guy can decide, and it’s him,” says one Democratic strategist.
“Biden would have to go voluntarily and then urge the party to seek a sensible replacement that was not his current vice-president,” says Frank Luntz, the political consultant and pollster. “Both scenarios don’t look likely at this point. It would require his most senior staff to tell him – and many of them don’t have the guts to do so.”
Who would be able to screw their courage to the sticking place? The Democrats don’t have any equivalent of the “men in grey suits” – the delegation of senior Tory MPs who told Margaret Thatcher that her time was up. Many are openly calling for Biden’s Democratic predecessors Obama and Bill Clinton to have a word.
Potential replacements for Biden – including Gavin Newsom and Gretchen Whitmer, the governors of California and Michigan respectively – will not want to appear disloyal.
The Democratic National Convention, where the party selects its nominees for president and vice-president, is due to be held in Chicago in mid-August. There is now a tiny window of opportunity of up to three weeks maximum before the momentum starts to build towards that event, according to political experts.
So, now the Democrats, the US and the rest of the world must wait to see whether Jill Biden believes, or can be persuaded, the time has come to once again say: NO.
