EXCELSIOR SPRINGS, Mo. — Jill Biden still teaches Monday through Thursday back in Delaware in the frantic last days of the presidential campaign.
Her students may know who she is, or they may not. They are busy people, community college students, many working and raising kids while they put themselves through school. If they’ve figured out who she is, they’ve mostly been too polite to say. Asked if she is Joe Biden’s wife, Jill always told them she is his “relative” and let the question drop. She is their English instructor, and that’s the most important thing.
Of course, the Secret Service has made it slightly more difficult to remain undercover. The officer dresses down, but still.
Recently, “one of the students in my 10 o’clock composition class said to me, ‘Hey, Dr. B, can I ask you something personal?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, long as it’s not my age.’ “
Jill Biden, 57, is leaning forward in a hotel room chair here. She’s a runner, and she’s tiny. She exaggerates her Philadelphia suburbs accent, which is already pretty strong. “He said: ‘You know every morning I come in here, there’s a guy with an earpiece in his ear. What’s that all about?’ I said, ‘I don’t know,’ ” Biden says, widening her eyes in an expression of true (fake) wonder.
On the campaign trail, it’s the opposite. There, many people don’t know her except as Joe Biden’s wife, the woman who will be second lady if Barack Obama wins the presidency. They see a wife who is not the most polished political performer, reading carefully from her speeches. They may not know she’s been teaching for 27 years, or that she earned her education doctorate just last year, or that she graded three essays on the way to this event.
Here in Excelsior Springs, at a luncheon for the Clay County Democrats, Biden makes a speech and then works a rope line, where she is buttonholed by a woman in her early 50s who is crying. The woman wants to thank Joe Biden for writing the breakthrough Violence Against Women Act, which became law in 1994. If that law had been on the books when she was a teenager, the woman tells Jill, “my sister would still be alive.” Jill hugs the woman and says she will tell Joe, then reaches out and peels off the woman’s adhesive name tag. (“So that I could write her a note,” she explains later. “So I wouldn’t lose it.”)
The woman, Diane Simonds-Carrell, a former legal secretary now on disability, sits back down at her table. Tears are still running down her face. “Finally I got heard by somebody who counted,” she’ll say later.
In the campaign fight over who’s middle class and who connects with the middle class, over who knows Joe the Plumber and who’s been best buds with Joe the Plumber since grade school, or some such thing, Jill stands squarely in that middle. She’s worked nearly all her life, her husband is one of the nation’s least-wealthy senators (that’s Senate poor, but still), and her students, she says, are working-class people trying to better their prospects in a bleak economy.
“I feel like I can make a greater difference in their lives,” Biden says. “I just love that population. It just feels really comfortable to me. I love the women who are coming back to school and getting their degrees because they’re so focused.”
It takes a certain type of person to teach at a community college. You get the humble title of “instructor.” You get students who have to drop school to take a second job, or students for whom the commute itself is a sacrifice.
“This is pretty personal,” Biden says, “but when my mother died two weeks ago, I called everybody in my 8:30 class because I knew for them to come to school if they didn’t hafta come there — that it would save them the gas.”
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She grew up Jill Jacobs in Willow Grove, Pa., the oldest of five girls. One sister is a flight attendant, another is a waitress at a breakfast joint, another a stay-at-home mom and the fourth until recently cared for their ailing mother.
Jill’s dad, the vice president of a small bank, died in 1999. Her mom, a homemaker, passed away during an astonishingly difficult week, even by the standards of presidential campaigns: three days after Joe Biden’s vice presidential debate against Sarah Palin and two days after Joe spoke at the deployment ceremony for their older son, Beau, the attorney general of Delaware and a captain in the state’s Army National Guard. After finishing training, he’s off to Iraq.
Pumping up voter-mobilization volunteers across Missouri through the weekend, Jill Biden talks about the importance of education, how tough the economy is for her students, about affordable health care and the war. Like Cindy McCain, who has two sons in the military, Biden wears a Blue Star Moms pin on her jacket. Unlike Cindy McCain, she backs Obama’s assessment that the war can end “responsibly” and soon. It tends to be her biggest applause line.
Jill has taught in public schools and at a psychiatric hospital for troubled adolescents. She earned two master’s degrees before starting on her doctorate, while still teaching.
“She got her doctorate under her maiden name,” says her friend Mary Doody, a fellow English instructor at Delaware Technical and Community College. “I guess she didn’t want professors to feel like they would treat her differently.”
“I had always kidded Joe and said the mail always comes ‘Senator and Mrs. Biden,’ ” Jill says. When she earned her diploma, she found that her husband had mounted signs in the driveway. One said, “Dr. and Senator Biden live here.”
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It was sort of Jill’s idea to run for president this time around. Joe was thinking about it but figured his family might ask him not to.
Jill had opposed his running in ‘04. She was still working on her doctorate and their daughter, Ashley, was still in college. But after George W. Bush’s re-election, “I literally wore black for a week,” Jill says. “I just could not believe that he won, because I felt that things were already so bad. I was so against the war. And I said to Joe, ‘You’ve got to change this, you have to change this.’ “
The story of the Biden family is one of deep lows followed by fantastic highs. Biden earned a measly 0.93 percent of the state delegates in Iowa and pulled out of the race that night. Months later, Obama picked him as his running mate.
“With everything that’s down, something good comes out of it, and I think that’s the way we look at things,” Jill says.
In 1987, during his first presidential campaign, Biden dropped out because of a plagiarism scandal and soon after suffered a brain aneurysm so severe that a priest administered last rites. Jill and his sister, Valerie Biden Owens, believe that if Joe hadn’t dropped out, he might’ve campaigned himself to death.
“He would’ve died, he would’ve definitely died,” Jill says.
“But look what happened when we got out,” says Val. “He continued the confirmation hearings of (Robert) Bork and was very critical in determining the makeup of the Supreme Court.”
The story of how Jill and Joe met is also framed by tragedy. Joe’s first wife, Neilia, and their baby daughter died in a car crash in 1972, six weeks after he was elected to the Senate at 29. Their sons, Beau and Hunter, were hospitalized, Beau in a full body cast.
A few years later, in the Wilmington airport, Biden was taken with several ads featuring a blond young woman. That was Jill, 23, a senior at the University of Delaware, posing for a photographer friend.
The way Joe tells it, that very night he came home, and his brother gave him the phone number of a girl he thought Joe would like. Joe called, and when he picked her up, he was astonished to see the gorgeous blonde from the ads.
It was his sons who first suggested to Joe that “we think we should marry Jill.” Joe asked her five or six times. She was nine years younger, she’d been married briefly before and she wasn’t keen on being a political wife. When she at last agreed, in 1977, the boys stood at the altar with them and joined them on their honeymoon.
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“We never ever thought — I mean we didn’t even think about it — that he would be chosen for vice president,” Jill says. She hoped she could still teach: “I felt it was my job.” She says she told Michelle Obama, “I would like to be in the classroom four days a week and then I’ll travel,” and that Michelle said great, because she herself was campaigning during the week and trying to be home with her kids on weekends.
“So, you see, our schedules would mesh beautifully,” Jill says, and the campaigning would all work out. And if the Obama-Biden ticket wins, that would mean moving to D.C. and figuring out whether she might like to teach at a community college in the capital. Because, she says, she would still like to teach. “I’ve been a working woman most of our married lives, so I’d still like to do that,” she says. And it would all work out, assuming, of course, that it all works out.
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