The first book I ever wrote – this was decades ago – was titled All the President’s Kin. The point of the book was simple: we badly underestimate the political impact of the presidents’ – and presidential candidates’ – wives, children, parents, and siblings.* Usually, one or more has a profound effect on who gets elected and on how presidential power is exercised.
Never has this been truer than now, when it can reasonably be argued that the outcome of the next presidential election depends on the conduct of Jill Biden. Jill Biden, the wife of President Joe Biden. Jill Biden who, by every account, is his most ardent supporter and closer to him than anyone else. Jill Biden, who by every account has believed with all her being that come November the present president is the only one who can defeat the former president, Donald Trump.
Which raises the question of the morning after. What is Jill Biden thinking this morning? And what if anything will she do in the aftermath of the most disastrous performance in the history of American presidential debates – her husband’s?
Donald Trump was true to form. He was neither substantive nor focused and he lied as incessantly as shamelessly. But as Democratic operative David Plouffe pointed out, on the debate stage he seemed not three years younger than Biden, which he is, but thirty. So, because it was immediately clear that Biden was looking totally terrible and sounding even worse, what he said mattered not a whit.
From everything we know about Joe Biden, Jill Biden is the only person on the planet who could, maybe, persuade him to pull out of the presidential race. So long as she refuses to consider the possibility, so will he. Which means that if events in the next few months play out as they did in the last few, she, every bit as much as he, will be responsible for returning Trump to the Oval Office. It’s why, at this pivotal moment in American history, her civic responsibility could not possibly be greater.
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*Every presidential spouse has been a wife.