Are these the women who’ll really rule the White House?
His wife has to prompt and protect him. And in his frail state, his staunchly left wing running mate really is a heartbeat from power. So if America votes for Joe, will it be ‘Presidents’ Jill and Kamala?
DEMOCRATS have been bursting with pride about Jill Biden.
While Republicans gnaw their hands in frustration at the almost complete absence until yesterday of Melania Trump from the campaign trail, the opposition has been able to contrast her with the ball of furious energy that is the wife of Joe Biden.
She’s been as visible and supportive as the glacial and monosyllabic Mrs Trump has been invisible and unhelpful.
But there’s supportive and supportive. Quite how much of a rock Mrs Biden is being for her 77-year-old, ‘gaffe machine’ of a husband (and that’s his own description) was revealed on Sunday when the would-be First Lady appeared to be feeding her tongue-tied husband with lines like a ventriloquist with her dummy,
The occasion was a ‘I Will Vote’ virtual concert in which Cher, Dame Helen Mirren, and numerous other Democrat-supporting stars urged voters to get out and get rid of Donald Trump at the polls next
‘Lack of energy and apparent confusion’
week. Interviewed on the significance of next week’s election, Biden quickly veered on to the rocks as he sat next to his wife on a sofa in their Delaware home.
‘The character of the country, in my view, is literally on the ballot,’ he said. ‘ What kind of country we’re gonna be. Four more years of George, uh, George, we are gonna find ourselves in a position where if, uh, Trump gets elected we’re going to be in a different world.’
Twice as he talked about ‘George’, Mrs Biden’s lips moved as she appeared to prompt him with the word ‘Trump’.
His enemies didn’t miss it. A delighted Trump, who has cruelly accused Biden of suffering from dementia, crowed that his opponent couldn’t remember his name.
Democrats pointed out Biden was being interviewed by another George, comedian George Lopez, but it was an unsatisfactory explanation. Voters have got used to horrible Biden foul-ups – since he launched his presidential bid, he has at least twice told voters that he’s running for the US Senate, appeared to forget the name of former Republican presidential contender Mitt Romney, confused his wife with his sister Valerie and claimed that ‘poor kids are just as bright and just as talented as white kids’.
Unfortunately, the energy and alertness of those around him – namely his wife and his running mate Kamala Harris – have only highlighted Biden’s lack of energy and, at times, apparent confusion. If, as is increasingly expected, he becomes President after a lacklustre campaign which has largely hinged on his simply not being Donald Trump, the impression will linger of the oldest White House victor in US history limping across the finishing line with women on either side propping up his arms.
As a result, the succession has become a highly sensitive issue. Biden would be nearly 82 by the time his first term ends.
And The Donald is losing no opportunity to remind voters that they may not be choosing between him and moderate ‘Sleepy Joe’ but between him and ‘Phony Kamala’, who would automatically succeed if he stepped down mid-term.
And if that did happen, the presidency would be in the hands of arguably the most radically Left-wing politician ever to hold the office.
For Kamala Harris is no milquetoast centrist but a politician who has adopted an increasingly radical agenda in order to win over the more extreme wings of the Democratic Party. She laughed on Sunday when an interviewer asked if she was a socialist.
But she couldn’t deny that she supports various Left-wing policies such as a carbon-free future under the so-called Green New Deal to which Biden hasn’t signed up.
And when, last year, a radio host asked if she supported legalising marijuana, she replied laughing: ‘Half my family’s from Jamaica – are you kidding me?’
While Harris has claimed she will be loyal to Biden on policy, the reality is that they are significantly apart on various key issues.
Biden has said he doesn’t support defunding the police, while Harris has spoken of ‘reimagining how we do public safety in America’. She also goes further than Biden on gun control, supporting the government’s compulsory purchase, or ‘ buy-back’, of all privately-owned assault weapons.
She supports a hugely expensive universal healthcare plan – socalled Medicare for All – while her running mate does not. And Harris has even proposed providing all workers with six months paid family leave for personal or medical issues, including domestic violence. It’s twice as long as even self-proclaimed socialist Bernie Sanders considered offering.
She also suggested large companies should be forced to be ‘equal pay certified’, leaving them open to stiff fines if they don’t close the gender pay gap. A child of migrants, she has pledged to offer a path to citizenship for all undocumented immigrants. More controversially, in a 2018 Senate hearing, she provoked conservative fury by comparing Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a US agency responsible for tracking down illegal immigrants, to the Ku Klux Klan.
On climate change, she opposes fracking and wants the government to take legal action against the fossil fuel industry.
None of this is surprising when we consider her background. Joe Biden’s running mate is about as different from The Donald’s robotic vice president Mike Pence as it’s possible to be. The spiky, forceful daughter of academics (her father is an economist, her mother a cancer researcher), she trained as a prosecuting lawyer and rose swiftly through the ranks, though not without controversy.
In the 1990s, the ambitious Harris started an affair with Willie Brown, a controversial and married black California politician who, at 31 years her senior, was almost the same age as her father.
Harris has since described him as ‘an albatross hanging around my neck’. And no wonder, He was twice investigated by the FBI for corruption – although never charged – and even played himself in the film The Godfather Part III, shaking hands with Michael Corleone. Brown
‘Albatross hanging around my neck’
mentored Harris, appointing her to two state commission posts and encouraging her ambitions.
In 2010, she was promoted to become California’s attorney general and in 2017 became the second ever black woman to win a seat in the Senate. The media started calling her ‘ the female Obama’.
By now Harris had married Doug, a corporate lawyer, becoming stepmother to his two children, Ella and Cole. A longtime supporter commented, that, as soon as Harris married, ‘I knew she was running for President’.
And so it proved. The California senator who once told colleagues that she would never seek the presidency as it was a ‘terrible job’, threw her hat in the ring last year. Her bid was widely seen as uninspiring, and she was forced to pull out, but not before tearing a strip or two off Biden in debates.
Harris won’t be the only woman flexing her muscles in a Biden White House.Melania Trump has never shown any enthusiasm for a First Lady role that, with its own office and budget, is far more significant than being a prime minister’s wife in the UK. All the signs are that Jill Biden is very different. With her endless appearances at virtual fund-raisers and rallies, she could have come straight out of a First Lady cloning programme.
A 69- year- old English teacher and grandmother who posts sensible, unfussy recipes with homely commentaries online, Mrs Biden has the sort of ‘back story’ that makes a presidential campaign manager weep for joy.
Born Jill Jacobs, the daughter of a bank cashier, she met Biden on a blind date in 1975 three years after his first wife died in a car crash along with their infant daughter.
Mr Biden later admitted he’d first seen her in a newspaper advertisement, and this summer, her first husband, Bill Stevenson, controversially claimed Jill began an affair with the senator while she was still married to him. Jill has said she initially thought Joe, nine years senior, was too old for her and, when he arrived to pick her up for a first date in the tie-dye 1970s wearing a suit and polished shoes, admits her first reaction was to think ‘Thank God this is only one date’. However, he surprised her with his kindness and charm, especially when he brought her home and said goodnight by shaking her hand.
‘I was so taken aback I ran upstairs and I called my mother – it was one in the morning – and said “Mum I have finally found a gentleman”,’ she recalls. Even so, Mr Biden said he had to ask her five times before she agreed to marry him. ‘Most of all I fell in love with the boys,’ she says of his two young sons by his first marriage.
If that gooey confidence doesn’t seal the deal with suburban housewives, Mrs Biden recently revealed that their favourite song is Have I Told You Lately (That I Love You), that she put on whenever he came home from the Senate. They married in 1977 and had a daughter in 1981.
There’s a steely side to Mrs Biden, too, which she displayed at a Biden rally in March when two militant vegans jumped on to the stage clutching ‘Let Dairy Die’ placards. Mrs B instantly inserted herself between them and her husband and thrust them away.
She runs five miles a day, five days a week and – if her husband wins – will become the first First Lady to carry on with her day job, as an English professor at North Virginia Community College. ‘Being a teacher is not what I do but who I am,’ she has said. She has written about doing school-marking while travelling on Air Force Two in her days as America’s ‘Second Lady’ in the Obama administration and once ‘scrambling into a cocktail dress and heels’ in a school lavatory to make it to a White House reception.
Assuming her husband wins the presidency, Jill Biden will do all she can to keep her husband in the White House.
While it’s currently all sweetness and light between Harris and Biden, insiders caution that the would-be Veep has a reputation for not being a team player.
However, if she ever does try to get one over on President Sleepy Joe, Harris will have his not- so sluggish wife to reckon with.
‘Gooey confidence’