You know what, I have no idea whether and when Joe Biden fully grasped how bad that was, but in watching Jill Biden on that stage — a vibrant, energetic woman with a doctorate as well as two working ears — I bet she knew. And I hope to God she is talking to her husband.
By now you’ve seen the highlights, and by highlights I mean lowlights. How Biden’s most passionate debate moment was defending his golf game. How, when he was served up a softball on abortion — Democrats’ most winning issue — he sputtered an incomprehensible answer about Roe v. Wade having “three trimesters. The first time is between a woman and a doctor. Second time is between a doctor and an extreme situation. A third time is between the doctor, I mean, between the women and the state.”
Of course, Donald Trump’s performance was actually much worse, in that his remarks were often blatant falsities: “post-birth abortion” is not, nor has it ever been, a thing. But this was television, and this is politics, and this is America. The question that ultimately matters isn’t who should win an election but who will win the election, based on a whole manner of voter behaviors that modern parlance has distilled to “vibes.”
Biden’s vibes were bad enough that you had Democratic operatives wondering on air whether the Democratic ticket should be upended last-minute — paging Gretchen Whitmer — and CNN’s John King asking who could broach this matter with the president. “Who can have that conversation?” he demanded, proposing Barack Obama and Bill Clinton before deciding their opinions might not carry enough sway. “Jill Biden?”
Yes. Get Jill in here. Please. It’s time for the crap part of marriage. The part where supporting your spouse means telling them very, very hard things.
I’m not saying that Jill Biden should tell him to drop out of the race, necessarily. She’s his partner, not his boss, and what he does or doesn’t do isn’t her responsibility or her fault. But I hope she can be clear-eyed for him. Because a man who, with the eyes of a troubled nation upon him, is more articulate about his golf handicap than his plan to restore reproductive freedom is not able to be clear-eyed for himself.
Jill would be able to reassure him that having a bad debate can still mean you’re a good president, but also make sure he understood that a debate that awful might preclude him from continuing to be president at all. She would be able to tell him that, yes, CNN moderators should have fact-checked Trump, and that, yes, debating against a human fire hose of falsehoods is unfair — but winning the unfair setup is what is required right now. Does he have that in him?
Is this emotional labor, the kind of work that should have been communicated by Biden’s aides rather than his family? Maybe. I don’t know. It’s also what people who have been married for decades do for one another every day. They say, I will be in your corner no matter what. Now let’s make sure that you are in your own corner.
This isn’t about whether you can lead, she could assure him. This is about whether the Americans who watched that debate will believe you can lead. This is about what’s ahead of you if you win, and about what is ahead of the country if you lose.
I hope she talks to him about his legacy, and the 50 years he’s spent building it, and how the thing you spent 50 years building can be undone in a matter of months by an electorate that cares not about the long past of a dedicated public servant but the immediate present of voters’ own lives. I hope they talk about Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
She could do it from a place of love. From the unique perspective of an American who cares as much about what the office of the president is doing to Joe Biden as she cares about what Joe Biden can do for the office of the president. She could speak to him with tenderness rather than admonishment, concern rather than panic.
I don’t know that anyone else in the country is in a position to do that. Because for the rest of us Americans, watching from our sofas on Thursday night, the panic was the thing. The debate wasn’t just a wry collection of “Grumpy Old Men” memes, the way some had predicted it might be. That debate was the scariest 90 minutes of non-disaster footage many of us have ever seen play out in real time on television. It was a nauseating, sickening experience that made many of us terrified for our country.
And I don’t know if Joe saw it, up there under the bright lights, clearing his throat, gaping his mouth, fumbling around for a coherent thought against an opponent who repelled truth but did so with aplomb. I don’t know if Joe saw it, but I think Jill did.
