History will not be kind to Jill Biden. 

The August edition of Vogue is out. Jill Biden is on the cover. Shocker, I know. However, the timing of this issue is awkward. It's a big ole puff piece on Jilly from Philly but it comes out just days after her husband's disastrous debate performance. 

The piece was written earlier in the year. The author writes about campaign events with Jill earlier in the winter and into April. So, the author reached out to Jill at Camp David yesterday to get a statement on the way forward for the Biden campaign.

Reached by phone on June 30 at Camp David, where the Biden family had gathered for the weekend, 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.”

This tracks with everything else being written about Jill. She isn't willing to throw in the towel. She wants to remain in the White House. But she is very wrong about Joe Biden doing "what's best for the country." If that was true, he wouldn't be running for re-election and she wouldn't be insisting that he do so. 

Frankly, Jill Biden isn't a great surrogate for her husband on the campaign trail. You'd think with her 50 years of experience at the side of her husband during his political career, she'd be better at it, but no. 

Remember when Jill was doing an event in San Antonio with a Hispanic women's audience? She was pandering to Hispanic voters but ended up alienating many of them when she compared them to breakfast tacos. That was cringeworthy.

In an event at Nine Mile Brewing, in Bloomington, Minnesota, Jill did it again. The audience was a Minnesota chapter of Women for Biden. About 200 people were in attendance. Outside the private room event, another 200 people were doing what people do in a brewery - drinking beer and watching sports on television. 

Jill compared the women to "gurgling brew vats." Oof. 

“We are the first generation in half a century to give our daughters a country with fewer rights than we had,” she tells the Women for Biden crowd a few minutes later. “Book bans. Voting laws gutted. Court decisions that strip away our most basic freedoms. But circumstance is not destiny.” The women here are fighting mad. Nice, Midwestern ladies, all of them, but gurgling away inside like those brewing vats—only with righteous fury, instead of beer. That’s what the Biden-Harris campaign is counting on: “We will decide our future,” the first lady tells them. Women gave Joe Biden his margin of victory in 2020, and since the Dobbs decision was handed down by the Supreme Court in June 2022, overturning Roe v. Wade, women have proved the decisive bulwark against this country’s reactionary forces, passing state ballot measures and constitutional amendments enshrining their reproductive rights, and helping limit Republicans’ midterm gains to a vanishingly narrow majority in the House. “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,” the first lady continues, ramping up to a crescendo. “It’s time we show them, once again, just what we can do!”

Righteous fury. That is what Jill is counting on from women voters. She acknowledged that women voters played a key role in Biden's win in 2020. She went through all the tropes that are included in Democrat talking points against Republicans - “Book bans. Voting laws gutted. Court decisions that strip away our most basic freedoms." All hyperbole but that's all she has to work with. 

She went to a rally with teachers and union leaders from the brewery. She was with her people there, she is one of them. The author stressed how wonderful it is to have a working First Lady - she teaches at a community college in Virginia twice a week during the school year. Jill patted herself on the back for telling Joe he needed to spend money - taxpayer dollars - on helping educators and their students. 

The author inadvertently makes the case for Trump, not Biden, as she yammers on about how well Jill relates to regular Americans like those in the Midwest.

What makes Jill Biden unique in current US politics, I mused, is that she is distinctively capable of speaking to, and from, two Americas. Not red and blue, the which-side-are-you-on divide shouted over on cable news, but rather, America, the exalted USA whose founding principles are under threat, and, ’Merica, as I like to think of it, that crazy quilt nation of Cheesecake Factories and cannabis dispensaries, pickleball courts and peewee football games, dirt roads and six-lane highways, where 336 million people are just, like, living their lives. And where, mostly, they just want their country to work. For themselves, for their families, and their communities. They want to be able to buy groceries and gas, send their kids to good, safe schools, obtain medical care when necessary, take a vacation now and then, drive on highway overpasses that aren’t crumbling and don’t have homeless encampments below, and wake up in the morning without a sense of dread that the climate is about to collapse. Is that too much to ask? And now they have to worry about democracy too?

Jill is not genteel, though. She shrieks at campaign rallies, yelling the word "liar" about Trump. She slams MAGA World. The author may think Jilly from Philly is good when she speaks to ordinary people in flyover country but it is Trump who wins their votes. 

Jill Biden grouses about the vitriol in American politics. She sounds clueless that Joe Biden has been the most divisive president in recent times, even more than Barack Obama. 

In the article Bernie Sanders's wife, Jane, sings Jill's praises. She compares Jill to Eleanor Roosevelt. That will piss off Hillary Clinton. Hilary worked hard to convince voters that she was the reincarnation of Eleanor Roosevelt. 

Vogue is well-known for supporting Democrats in elected office. Melania Trump, a former model who dresses in haute couture on the regular, was shunned because of the R after her name. She was previously featured before her husband entered politics and they were all Democrats. 

We'll see more of this. Jill will be used to soften the blow that Biden is dangerously incompetent. His dementia is accelerating and there is no stopping that. Her role in the campaign will be more important than ever. Just like she wanted. She's running the show and she's not bashful about saying so. 

"Every campaign is important, and every campaign is hard,” shares Dr. Jill Biden, the first lady and Vogue’s August cover subject. Whatever happens between now and November, it is Jill Biden who will remain the president's closest confidant and advocate. https://t.co/y6WcDbsWtf pic.twitter.com/4LQFUzoVx6

— Vogue Magazine (@voguemagazine) July 1, 2024