Joe Biden’s greatest sounding board in the Oval Office will be Jill Biden
While Americans struggled to get to know Melania Trump, Dr Jill Biden enters the White House as a First Lady unlike any other.
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When Joe Biden was being pressured by Democrat leadership in 2004 to consider a second tilt at the presidency and run against George W Bush, his then 53-year-old wife didn’t think it was the right move for her family at the time.
The problem was that with political strategists crowded into her Wilmington living room telling Mr Biden what he wanted to hear, she was having trouble getting across the message that she wasn’t going to have any of it.
“I was sitting at the pool in my swimsuit,” she wrote in her 2019 memoir.
“My temper got the best of me. I decided I needed to contribute to this conversation. As I walked through the kitchen, a Sharpie caught my eye. I drew NO on my stomach in big letters, and marched through the room in my bikini.”
Needless to say, Jill Biden got her way, and her senator husband held back his presidential ambitions for another four years.
Now a marathon-running grandmother-of-five who was her husband’s most energetic 2020 campaign surrogate, it was Dr Jill Biden’s support of his third and ultimately successful run that is credited by many as one of the key factors that snared the White House for him.
“She was an incomparable and invaluable campaign weapon,” Moe Vela, a Democrat strategist who helped establish Mr Biden’s office as Barack Obama’s vice president, said.
“Nobody knows Joe Biden better than Jill and she found her voice on the campaign trail to become a magnificent ambassador.”
Dr Biden was perhaps more prepared than any modern First Lady when she moved into the White House this week.
Having served eight years as Second Lady alongside her good friend Michelle Obama, she knew precisely what she was getting herself into.
In a week of historic firsts that include the appointment of the first ever female vice president in Kamala Harris, Dr Biden, 69, was set to make her own mark and become the only First Lady to keep her day job, saying she wants to continue teaching community college.
“If we get to the White House, I’m gonna continue to teach,” she said in November.
Mrs Obama paid tribute to this work ethic in 2016 after Dr Biden continued teaching throughout her time as Second Lady.
“Jill is always grading papers,” Mrs Obama said.
“Which is funny because I’d forget, ‘Oh yeah, you have a day job!’ And then she pulls out her papers and she’s so diligent and I’m like, ‘Look at you! You have a job! Tell me! Tell me what it’s like!’”
In continuing to earn a wage, Dr Biden would “really be bringing the role of first lady into the 21st century”, said presidential historian Katherine Jellison from Ohio University.
“Americans have historically wanted their first ladies to be in the White House and at the president’s side whenever possible,” Professor Jellison said.
“Maybe the time has come when Americans will be more accepting of the idea that a president’s wife can simultaneously be a first lady and a working professional.”
Dr Biden – who holds three university degrees and a masters – has also pledged to return some tradition to the role that has been absent over the past four years.
Americans had four years to get to know Melania Trump and it’s not exaggerating to say she left the White House this week almost as much a mystery as when she entered.
For varied reasons ranging from her personal reserve, the antipathy of America’s liberal-leaning mainstream media, an unwillingness to engage as a traditional First Lady and – not least – her deeply divisive husband’s particular brand of leadership, Mrs Trump left the position with the lowest public approval on record.
In contrast, Dr Biden took on the role with high voter support, in part due to her pledge to reinstate convention and advocacy to the role that she inherited on Wednesday.
“The beauty of (being First Lady) is that you can define it however you want,” she said in 2019.
“And that’s what I did as second lady – I defined that role the way I wanted it to be. I would still work on all the same issues. Education would be right up there, and military families. I’d travel all over this country trying to get free community college.”
Her eight years experience as Second Lady and as her husband’s most trust counsel, Dr Biden this week became one of the world’s most powerful women.
And she was instrumental in anointing Mr Biden’s other most prominent female influence, having personally vetted Ms Harris ahead of her joining her husband on the ticket last year.
After an uneasy primary race in which Ms Harris had all but labelled Mr Biden racist during a debate, Dr Biden was reportedly concerned that Ms Harris would be the right person for the role.
The attack by Ms Harris on Mr Biden in 2019 for having worked with Republican senators who supported school bussing was one of the primary debate season’s most electrifying moments.
After she dropped out of the presidential race and set her sights on securing the vice presidential nomination, Ms Harris had to work hard to win over Dr Biden and Valerie Biden Owens, Mr Biden’s sister and another key confidante.
She was aided by the fact of her strong friendship with Beau Biden, Mr Biden’s eldest son who before he died in 2015 was Delaware’s attorney general while Ms Harris held the same role in California.
But it wasn’t until the Harris family spent a weekend at the Bidens’ home that Dr Biden gave her blessing.
“This is a marriage, and I feel very protective of my husband and my children, as is any mother,” Dr Biden told Time Magazine in December.
“You move beyond it — that’s politics.”
Dr Biden hasn’t only been a moral support to her husband, who at 78 is the oldest ever US president.
Twice while he campaigned she stood between him and protesters on stage.
“I’m a good Philly girl,” she said last February after stopping a heckler in New Hampshire.
Mr Vela said this sense of humour was one of Dr Biden’s strongest qualities.
“She’s real. I think her greatest gift, frankly, is her authenticity. She is a woman who is obviously highly educated, she’s got that beautiful balance between intellect and empathy,” he told News Corp Australia.
“In layperson’s terms, one of the beautiful things I love about Jill is that I’ve never seen her put on airs. She is who she is.”
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