We all know Jill Biden was a terrible first lady, given that she hid from the country the fact that her husband had cognitively lost it. But a new book from the left argues that her awfulness as first lady goes beyond concealing her husband’s decline from the country. This is not a matter of not being progressive enough for their tastes. The book (gently) goes after her for being a self-interested coward who cares for no one but herself and her husband.
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The book, The East Wing: Power, Intrigue, and the Untold Story of America’s First Ladies, is by Azadeh Moaveni, and it will be out this November. An excerpt of the book was published by Vanity Fair earlier this week.
Most first ladies have a cause. Michelle Obama was all about childhood obesity and gardening. Laura Bush focused on childhood literacy. Melania has “Be Best,” which is concerned with the well-being of children, but it’s admittedly vague. But Jill Biden had nothing. She didn’t care to bother even attempting to have a cause. (RELATED: Jill Biden: The Worst First Lady Ever)
All Jill cared about was, in the words of Moaveni, “propping up Joe.” Jill, she said, “never pursued a distinct project.”
“With time it would become clear that Jill’s choices — the events she attended, the strategy behind her travel schedule, the projects she took up, her interventions and her silences — were all fanatically devoted to propping up Joe.”
As Moaveni described it: “She stood steadfastly by her man and squeezed herself into such a narrow, Joe-centric persona that public opinion about the two of them essentially merged.”
Moaveni tells us that the left had high expectations that Jill would pursue something substantial, given that she had (on paper at least) co-led a major project aside from Michelle Obama while she was second lady, Joining Forces. She also was a working teacher, so education screamed out as an obvious policy area to get involved in. Yet she had no interest. Instead of choosing staff who could help her accomplish something, she chose to make a Biden loyalist, Anthony Bernal, her senior adviser, and put him at the center of everything, even though, according to Moaveni, he was “blunt, domineering, and divisive.” But Bernal got the program. He understood that the be-all and end-all was propping Joe up.
On Jill’s profile page on Joe’s presidential library website, the only accomplishment from her time as first lady that is listed is her work on the Joining Forces initiative that Michelle Obama started. You’d think she could have at least come up with a cause to claim that she was involved in.
Moaveni shows us how Jill was selfish and cowardly (though she doesn’t admit that directly) through her response to the crisis in Afghanistan. While the U.S. military was desperately working to get people to safety, the country was processing the loss of 13 service members due to a suicide bombing at Kabul airport, and the U.S. was looking weaker than it had in decades, Jill and her top staffers met for an “emergency call.” According to Moaveni, “the purpose of the call was to discuss how to shield the First Lady.”
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During the emergency call, staffers plotted out how they could cancel all of Jill’s events for the Joining Forces initiative, which is focused on supporting military families. The goal was to “stop[] all activities that might expose the First Lady to public anger or questioning about Afghanistan.”
One former staffer spilled to Moaveni: “They had a huge fear of doing anything at bases, they were just petrified… Even though this was when military communities needed support.”
When Jill finally got up the gumption to face members of the armed forces following the bungling of the Afghanistan withdrawal, she banned any press from attending, presumably out of fear that they would publicize any recriminations she received for her husband’s failures. This was, Moaveni tells us, “a sharp departure from usual practice.”
Moaveni then makes a really good point. This would have been the absolute perfect opportunity for Jill to step up and fight for the rights of Afghan women, who faced a terrible plight with the takeover of the Taliban, and were being banned from attending school or working. In fact, first ladies since the 1990s had given special priority to helping their cause. Hillary Clinton and Laura Bush had both utilized resources to evacuate Afghan women. The East Wing had, Moaveni said, “a compact with Afghan women.” Moaveni said, “If there was any pocket of women’s activism in the world that the United States, particularly the Office of the First Lady owned and owed, it was Afghan women.” Moreover, Jill taught at a community college that frequently had students who had immigrated from Afghanistan. Jill herself had taught many of these Afghan students. This was a cause crying out for attention, and Jill was perfectly positioned to speak out.
But she was too cowardly, evidently fearing this would put attention on her husband’s failure. After all, it was because of him that they were in this terrible plight and subject to the whims and demands of the Taliban. So Jill did and said nothing.
“It was hard to understand why, as a First Lady who championed education and women, she had nothing to say,” wrote Moaveni.
There was another time when Jill let down women and girls: she refused to acknowledge the daughter that Hunter had out of wedlock. It was only after she and Joe were called out for ignoring their granddaughter’s existence in the New York Times that Joe (by himself) issued a statement acknowledging her for the first time, saying, “ Jill and I only want what is best for all of our grandchildren, including Navy.”
Jill was an awful first lady, but at least she didn’t, as liberals had hoped she would do, actually accomplish any progressive priorities as first lady.
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