No Offense, but Jill Biden Shouldn’t Be Anywhere Near the Decision About Whether Biden Drops Out

One of the few narratives to emerge in the aftermath of Joe Biden’s disastrous debate performance late last week is that whatever happens next will happen only with the blessing of the president’s wife. If Biden is to bow out of the race, it will happen only because of her intervention; if he keeps on, it will be in part because of her unflagging encouragement.

“The only person who has ultimate influence with him is the first lady,” an unnamed source close to the president told NBC News. “If she decides there should be a change of course, there will be a change of course.” The New York Times likewise reported on unnamed donors who “wondered about whom in the Biden fold they could contact to reach Jill Biden, the first lady, who in turn could persuade her husband not to run.” Axios went almost gloves-off in declaring that only the “Biden oligarchy” could decide Biden’s fate. According to the outlet, “Dr. Jill Biden; his younger sister, Valerie Biden; and 85-year-old Ted Kaufman, the president’s longtime friend and constant adviser—plus a small band of White House advisers—are the only Biden deciders.”

It wasn’t just traditional news media. Right-wing content farms quickly started churning out takes about how “Lady Mac-Biden” was “desperately clinging to power.” The National Review referred to Jill Biden as “the Decider.”

Some of this can be written off as sexism. There’s been a lot of wife-blaming going around this election cycle, on both sides of the aisle.

But there’s an element of much deeper concern in all this coverage. It’s not just that these outlets are hand-wringing about what role Dr. Jill Biden could play in Biden’s decision. The question is: Why the hell would this decision be up to Dr. Jill Biden, even in part, at all?

If this were truly a personal family issue—a deliberation over whether to place an elderly spouse into assisted living, for instance—then Jill Biden as the “decider” would make perfect sense. But Jill is not making a personal decision or even a medical decision. She would be making a political one. In effect, she would be deciding on the viability and future of the Democratic Party.

This is, to put it bluntly, not Jill Biden’s job.

And the situation at hand is arguably exactly what a political party exists for. Joe Biden is the president, and as such he is the Democratic figurehead. The structure of a political party is such that the figureheads are supposed to be mutable, while the platform and policies are durable. The top party representative shouldn’t matter as much as the mission. And political parties exist to facilitate the smooth and continuous passing of the baton.

So who the hell is putting all of this onus on Jill?

The Democratic National Committee is full of highly paid and theoretically qualified members whose sole purpose is to make decisions to provision for the continuous betterment of the party. They have pollsters and data and money—all in the service of this specific goal. These are some of the first people who should be called upon in this moment to figure out what the party should do next—not Jill. (There is a reason it is not called the Biden Party for Democratic Outcomes.)

Beyond the party, there’s actually an even more qualified class of people who should be making this decision: the people tasked with turning out Democratic voters. High on that list are labor unions, grassroots groups, Black churches—the institutions that actually do the work of getting Democratic voters energized enough to win elections. Then there are the Democratic voters themselves. Especially for a party with democracy rooted in the name, the infusion of some democratic process into the Democratic process sure wouldn’t hurt.

The first lady has worn plenty of hats in her life; she has been a philanthropist and an educator. I bet she is very well qualified to help make decisions about her family. She has been one of Biden’s closest confidants over 50 years in politics, and she has been at his side for decades of campaigns. I have no doubt she is really good at that. But one role you’ll see nowhere on her lengthy CV is political strategist for the Democratic Party—so, when it comes to whether Biden stays in the race, she doesn’t have that kind of expertise. (And even if she did, she wouldn’t be capable of being unbiased in that expertise here.)

Again, I’m not saying Jill Biden can’t be in charge of this decision because she is inept, shortsighted, untrustworthy. Or because she is a power-hungry Eva Perón, the onetime Argentinian president who took over the role from her husband, despite the conservative commentators making that comparison. (For one thing, if Jill Biden were shadow president, as the Daily Caller claims, surely we would have seen more in the way of her own concerns, like, say, education policy.)

She’s not qualified to make this decision because the stakes are gargantuan and it would be unfair to lay all of that on the shoulders of one bystander. As Democrats have been telling us for years, the entirety of the American democratic process hangs in the balance of this election. Foisting the pressure on Jill to push her husband out, or pressure him in, is a way of shifting the blame in advance if Trump wins a second term. And that would be utterly unfair.

If a political party exists for anything at all, it is for this. It doesn’t make sense for Democrats, for fear of offending the president, to forgo the hard conversations or their part in a decision. So to say it’s all riding on Jill Biden—especially in anonymous quotes to newspapers—is actually a grotesque abdication of responsibility by all of Democratic leadership.

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