The reaction has been scathing: Their future? Is this really all about them?
To be fair, that line on the cover, which also appeared in Vogue’s fawning profile, was lifted from a stump speech about women’s empowerment.
But the statement the first lady offered the magazine after President Biden’s calamitous debate performance was no more reassuring. She insisted the president “will always do what’s best for the country,” even as she defiantly declared that he “will not let those 90 minutes define the four years he’s been president. We will continue to fight.”
What is best for the country is not for the Bidens to continue that battle, at least not in the way they have so far.
If the president chooses to stay in the race, he must be a very different kind of candidate — and a very different kind of president. He must take off the protective shrink-wrap in which he has been enveloped and step out more from behind his teleprompter. Most of all, this moment calls for complete candor about whether this 81-year-old man is fit for another four years in the most grueling job on Earth.
No one knows the truth of his condition better than his wife, who is, by all accounts, his closest confidante. But the president’s tendency to retreat into the counsel of his own family likely will not serve either him or the nation well. Nor will his palace guard’s declaration that what the country saw last Thursday was no more than a “bad night.”
Let us hope that the conversations between the couple are more honest than the cringeworthy, infantilizing performance that Jill Biden gave when they appeared onstage at a post-debate watch party. “Joe, you did such a great job!” Jill said. “You answered every question! You knew all the facts!” She needs to tamp down the reflexes with which she shoved a heckler off the stage at one of her husband’s campaign events in 2020.
I admire Jill Biden and have long believed that the first lady is the White House’s most undervalued and underutilized asset.
She is the first presidential spouse to insist upon continuing to pursue her own career while residing at the White House, teaching English at a community college after showing grit to get her doctorate in education at age 55. That position offers her a connection to the real world of people who struggle to get ahead in a way that few inside the rarefied atmosphere of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. can understand. She has also taken on the causes of military families, including the spouses who are frustrated by their limited career options in a life that requires uprooting every few years.
Then there is the personal backstory of how she rescued a family — a father and two little boys — that had been shattered by the loss of a wife and mother, a baby daughter and sister.
“I never imagined, at the age of 26, I would be asking myself: How do you make a broken family whole?” she recounted in her speech to the virtual Democratic National Convention in 2020. “Still, Joe always told the boys, ‘Mommy sent Jill to us,’ and how could I argue with her? And so we figured it out together.”
If what the president and his wife determine together now is that he should stay in the race, Jill Biden must step up to assure that he can perform at his highest capacity, whatever that is. Even as he faces demands to appear more often in unscripted settings, she must fight the schedulers and political hands who will also argue that the president be everywhere at once. She must make sure he gets rest when he needs it. She must assume a Nancy Reagan-esque role as the in-house enforcer.
And if they decide the time has come to call an end to his half-century of public service, Jill Biden will be called upon, once again, to show strength and resilience to help bring him, his party and the nation through the turbulence that lies ahead.
Yes, “first lady” is a title that comes with no job description. Each has had to figure it out on her own. But few have had quite the moment of testing that faces Jill Biden now. And that line on Vogue’s cover is right. The Bidens will indeed decide their future — and the rest of ours as well.
Credit: Source link
