POLITICS: Putting herself first as country flounders under Joe

A few months after her husband took office, Jill Biden posted a photo of herself sitting at a desk aboard Air Force One on social media looking very important.

“Prepping for the G7,” she wrote on her @FLOTUS “US Government Official” account, under the photo in which a scholarly “Dr. Jill” wearing reading glasses, pen in hand, is studying a thick ring binder of notes.

A flight jacket with the presidential seal is draped over the back of the chair, to leave you in no doubt about the power behind the throne.

As the 72-year-old wife of the oldest president in history, the effrontery of this spousal usurper on her first overseas trip was a portent of liberties to come.

Three years later, as her husband, now 81, grows increasingly befuddled, Dr. Jill is stepping up, doing solo campaign visits and TV appearances, weighing in on politics and polls as if it were she who is running for office.

And now we hear that the first lady has been pressuring her husband on Israel’s war on Hamas with these words: “Stop it. Stop it now, Joe.”

At a Ramadan event at the White House last week, Joe Biden reportedly told attendees about Jill’s sophisticated geopolitical advice.

The New York Times report was titled “Jill Biden Privately Urges an End to Conflict in Gaza.”
Lo and behold, over the weekend Israel withdrew all its ground troops from southern Gaza, a move characterized by the White House as a “rest and refit” for the troops.

No doubt Jill will chalk it up as a win for her wise counsel.

‘Secret weapon’

With Vice President Kamala Harris a perpetual drag on opinion polls, the Biden brains trust has decided the marginally less vacuous first lady is their “secret weapon” to win over suburban women on the campaign trail.

Last month she toured California making speeches comparing Florida to Nazi Germany and falsely claiming the state was banning books and forcing people not to say the word “gay.”

“History teaches us that democracies don’t disappear overnight,” said Dr. Jill. “They disappear slowly, subtly silently. A book ban, a court decision, a Don’t Say Gay law.”

At least she is not comparing Hispanic people to “breakfast tacos,” as she did once on a visit to San Antonio.

That did not go down well with the National Association of Hispanic Journalists.

“We are not tacos,” they said in a statement.

With all due respect, it was clear from her 2006 dissertation for her Ed. D that Jill Jacobs-Biden is not the sharpest pencil in the drawer.

“Student Retention at the Community College: Meeting Students’ Needs,” contains such inspirational insights as: “In an average-sized class of twenty students at Delaware Tech, for example, most of the seats will be filled with young students who have just graduated from high school.”

The writing is assessed at a 12th-grade reading level by ChatGPT.

You wouldn’t want to go as far as her wayward stepson Hunter in critiquing her IQ. He once called her “a f–king moron,” in a series of texts he sent his uncle Jim.

Hunter claimed he told Jill: “The drunkest I’ve ever been is still smarter than you could ever even comprehend and you’re a shut [sic] grammar teacher that wouldn’t survive one class in a ivy graduate program.”

Dr. No

But Jill’s insistence on being called “Dr.,” although the honorific is usually reserved for medicos, or at least Ph.D.s, opens her to criticism, because status is an unbecoming obsession in the Biden household.

Her husband once explained why Jill pursued the degree: “She said, ‘I was so sick of the mail coming to Sen. and Mrs. Biden. I wanted to get mail addressed to Dr. and Sen. Biden.’ That’s the real reason she got her doctorate.”

Now, while her husband hides from the media, Dr. Jill appears on breakfast television denying his dismal poll numbers.

“No, he’s not losing in all the battleground states,’ she told “CBS Mornings” when asked about a poll showing Joe losing to Donald Trump in six of seven battleground states and tied in Wisconsin. “He’s coming up even or doing better . . . It’s obvious that Joe will win this election.”

Despite efforts by women’s magazines to soft-soap her image, it’s not clear she can help Joe out of the polling doldrums.

A lot of women look at Jill and wonder how she can allow her husband to keep bumbling around and falling over on camera.

A Nancy Reagan would have been by his side like a limpet ensuring his dignity was preserved or at least insisting that staffers take up the slack, instead of leaving the leader of the free world looking like an escapee from an aged care facility.

Caught on the tarmac once helping him get into a jacket when he seemed to have forgotten what armholes are, Jill looked more exasperated than solicitous. It is a difficult situation, for sure, but the wise counsel she should have given Joe was not to run for a second term.

Instead she continues to enable his behavior and revel in the perks, jetting around the world solo on Air Force One to a wedding in Jordan or to meet the president of Namibia.

Imagine the outcry if it were Melania Trump getting ideas above her station.

Compassion?

But no matter how ghastly Jill’s White House drag queen performances or freaky Christmas dancers, she rarely is criticized compared to her predecessor.

Jill’s compassion “superpower” recently was lauded by Women’s Health in a cover story titled “The Extraordinary Strength and Grace of Dr. Jill Biden.”

But there wasn’t much compassion for the seventh Biden grandchild, Navy Roberts, Hunter’s love child with a former strip club waitress, whom Jill and Joe refused to acknowledge for four years.

Jill wrote a children’s book dedicated to her grandchildren, all of whom she named — except Navy. She hung stockings at the White House each Christmas for six grandchildren and the pets — but not for Navy.

When Joe and Jill finally issued a statement to People last year as part of Hunter’s reduced child support settlement with Navy’s mom Lunden, they said: “Jill and I only want what is best for all of our grandchildren, including Navy.”

But that Christmas they broke with tradition and did not hang Santa stockings for any of their grandchildren at the White House, so Navy missed out again.

You would rather not criticize a first lady but she ought to stay in her lane.