First Lady Dr. Jill Biden covers the August issue of Vogue. It was planned months ago and the bulk of the interview was completed weeks ago, before President Biden’s awful debate performance. Vogue added a paragraph to their story online, with comments from Dr. Biden about her husband’s debate performance though: “She told Vogue that they ‘will not let those 90 minutes define the four years he’s been president. We will continue to fight.’ President Biden, she added, ‘will always do what’s best for the country.’” The rest of the piece is about how hard Dr. Biden works on the campaign trail and as her husband’s closest advisor, and how she does it all while holding down her job as a professor at a community college. You can read the full piece here. Some highlights:
What Dr. Biden says on the campaign trail: “We are the first generation in half a century to give our daughters a country with fewer rights than we had. Book bans. Voting laws gutted. Court decisions that strip away our most basic freedoms. But circumstance is not destiny. We will decide our future. When our bodies are on the line, when our daughters’ futures are at stake, when our country and its freedom hang in the balance, we are immovable and unstoppable. It’s time we show them, once again, just what we can do!”
What books she assigns her students. She reels off a few titles—Trevor Noah’s Born a Crime is a perennial favorite, she says—then notes that, of late, she prefers to assign articles “because books are expensive. And whatever I give them, it has to be short. Because they leave my class and go straight to work, many of them. They may work until eight o’clock, then they have to do my homework, and they might have kids, too, or parents to take care of.” Some of the first lady’s students are immigrants, still polishing their English skills. Others are older women looking to reenter the workforce.
She’s her husband’s eyes and ears on the ground: “Really, in so many different areas. I tell him what I’m seeing, what I’m hearing—and he gets it. And this is where the magic happens.”
The urgency is different: “Every campaign is important, and every campaign is hard. Each campaign is unique. But this one, the urgency is different. We know what’s at stake. Joe is asking the American people to come together to draw a line in the sand against all this vitriol. We don’t need more chaos,” she continues. That’s a story of America she refuses to tell. “Fundamentally, Americans care about each other. And this anger and animosity and divisiveness…it’s not who we are. We’re good people.”
What her husband has already done: “If people knew what Joe’s done—with the recovery act, and infrastructure, and CHIPS,” she starts, reeling off a few of the president’s first-term accomplishments: the American Rescue Plan of 2021, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (passed the same year), and the CHIPS and Science Act, signed in 2022, crafted to spur domestic manufacture of semiconductors. “If they knew all of that—I mean, the bridge is being built in their city and they don’t know who did it. They don’t know who’s getting the lead out of their water. They don’t know who’s stopping the pipeline going through the parklands. They don’t know.” She seems bewildered by this. But then, where do people even get their news now? TikTok? Some guys’ podcast? “That’s why I’m trying to be out there. Why we’re all trying. To say, ‘This is what we’ve achieved, and this is how it affects your life.’ ”
Entering the White House during the pandemic: “We were so slammed. We’d never experienced anything like that. Financially, emotionally, socially—every aspect of our lives was affected. And Americans want things fixed fast. Well, it’s happening. Look at where we are now. Things are better. They’re still getting better. It takes time to stand things up again. Look, I know that food prices are up. I go to the grocery store when I’m in Wilmington. And I raised three kids, and did the food shopping for how many years before we got to this job? It’s not like I don’t know.”
Just my opinion, but I believe this election really will hinge on women and women’s rights, which have been drastically curtailed in the past seven years. While the Biden administration stands for women and women’s rights, I sometimes think President Biden isn’t the most effective spokesperson for his administration’s efforts to fight against the rollback of rights. That’s why Dr. Biden is being pushed so much, and that’s why the administration has basically handed reproductive issues to VP Harris to talk about. I need them both to talk about it more, to not listen to the political bros who say “the election is going to be about this or that.” No, it’s going to be about women. Lean into it. Make the campaign all about that.
In Vogue’s 2024 August issue, First Lady Jill Biden discusses what’s at stake in 2024. Read the full profile here: https://t.co/DoKtZKwn0N pic.twitter.com/zE31edQKNc
— Vogue Magazine (@voguemagazine) July 1, 2024
Cover courtesy of Vogue.