It Has Come to This: Sex and the Capital City
“The Golden Bachelor,” a reality TV series about older people dating, showed that sex is not just for the young. Hearing aids and kissing in a hot tub can go blissfully together.
Now comes the Golden President. Even though fretful questions about his age have engulfed Joe Biden’s campaign, one thing is clear: His romance with Jill is still crackling.
At a party at his house when he was vice president, he told me about the frisson of watching his wife come down the stairs, dressed up for a special occasion.
They had been married for decades, he said, “but my heart still goes pitty-pat when I see her.”
Biden’s uxorious relationship with his wife has sealed her role as his top navigator as he charts his re-election course as the oldest president in American history.
The amorous Biden marriage is chronicled in a new book by Katie Rogers, a New York Times White House correspondent: “American Woman: The Transformation of the Modern First Lady, From Hillary Clinton to Jill Biden.”
Parenthetically, Rogers notes: “Joe may have tamped down his public bedroom declarations winning the presidency, but he has joked to aides that ‘good sex’ is the key to a lasting and happy marriage, much to his wife’s chagrin.”
Rogers recalls the time in 2004 when Biden was considering getting into the U.S. presidential race to challenge the Democrat John Kerry. During a meeting when aides were begging him to join the race, Jill walked into the room wearing a halter top with the word “No” scrawled on her stomach. Biden followed that sexy veto.
“In 2006, Joe still seemed more interested in staying home with Jill than in running for the presidency,” Rogers writes, “and he said as much to a group of supporters that year: ‘I’d rather be at home making love to my wife while my children are asleep,’ he said of his interest in the job.”
Biden’s aides were accustomed to his very personal outpourings. The most famous profile ever done about him was Kitty Kelley’s Washingtonian piece in 1974 — a year and a half after his beautiful young wife, Neilia, and baby daughter, Naomi, died in a car crash at Christmastime.
“Neilia was my very best friend, my greatest ally, my sensuous lover,” he said. “The longer we lived together the more we enjoyed everything from sex to sports.” In an office with 35 pictures of Neilia, he pointed out one of his “beautiful millionaire wife” in a bikini, noting, “She looks better than a Playboy bunny, doesn’t she?”
He said he was so exhausted from campaigning for the Senate in 1972, “I’d come back too tired to talk to her. I might satisfy her in bed but I didn’t have much time for anything else.”
Some — including Jill — might find the 81-year-old Golden President’s frisky comments about the first lady cringey.
But at least he is celebrating sensuality. Conservatives seem determined to stamp it out.
Donald Trump, Senator Mitch McConnell and the Federalist Society conspired to install a radically conservative U.S. Supreme Court, which then overturned abortion rights as soon as it had the chance. Republicans thought they could finesse things with voters, but now they can’t contain the puritanical, punitive forces sweeping America.
Even Trump pushed back on the Alabama Supreme Court’s ruling that frozen embryos have the rights of children, which is wreaking havoc at fertility clinics and disrupting dreams of would-be parents.
“I strongly support the availability of I.V.F. for couples who are trying to have a precious, little, beautiful baby,” Trump said recently, referring to in vitro fertilization.
As The Times reported, Trump has told advisers he may support a 16-week abortion ban in the United States with exceptions in the case of rape and incest and to save the life of the mother. He said he likes the number 16 because “it’s even.”
He has been campaigning like a messenger from God. “No one will be touching the cross of Christ under the Trump administration — I swear to you,” he told Christian broadcasters recently.
That great moral philosopher Donald Trump mused, “If you think about it, you have men, you have women, and you have religion.”
The former louche New York playboy knows that it will not help him in the race if his party is seen as a bunch of puritans interfering in the lives of women who are in desperate straits and need an abortion, and women who are in desperate straits and want children.
Trump is trying to replace American democracy with a me-ocracy. But the Old Testament language of Alabama’s chief justice, Tom Parker, shows that some of these zealots on courts want to replace our democracy with a theocracy. In his concurring opinion, the justice quoted the book of Genesis: “Therefore to kill man is to deface God’s image, and so injury is not only done to man, but also to God.”
He declaimed: “Human life cannot be wrongfully destroyed without incurring the wrath of a holy God,” adding, “Even before birth, all human beings have the image of God, and their lives cannot be destroyed without effacing his glory.”
ProPublica and The New Republic noted that Justice Parker once wrote: “When judges don’t rule in the fear of the Lord, everything’s falling apart. The whole world is coming unglued.”
The world is coming unglued, but that is because of hypocrites like Trump unleashing the demons.