During the Democratic National Convention in August, Jill Biden spoke to the delegation from the empty halls of a high school in Wilmington, Delaware, where she once worked as a teacher. “With Joe as president, these classrooms will ring out with laughter and possibility once again,” she promised.
This week, she was back in a classroom, albeit one with children in it. “It’s so nice to be here,” the first lady told the kindergarteners at Connecticut’s Benjamin Franklin school this week. “I’m Jill.”
But as the pandemic enters its second year, many US public schools continue to rely on virtual lessons; roughly half had no in-person learning at the start of the year. Republicans have accused the new administration of reopening too slowly because it is in hock to unionised teachers who do not want to go back to work.
The White House has responded by making Jill Biden the face of its campaign to get children back into the classroom, in an early sign of the kind of role she will play as first lady.
She travelled this week with the newly confirmed education secretary on a two-state tour, adding to a heavy schedule — including visits to local businesses and military hospitals — that has already made her a much more visible presence than her predecessor Melania Trump.
In addition to education, Biden has started to flesh out other areas of interest, including supporting military families and cancer research, a testimony to the couple’s late son Beau who served in Iraq and later died from a brain tumour.
Meanwhile, Alejandro Mayorkas, the administration’s new homeland security secretary, has credited Biden’s “moral imperative” for the administration’s new focus on reuniting separated migrant families.
Beyond the carefully choreographed appearances, people who know Jill Biden say her biggest role will be behind the scenes as her husband’s sounding board and unofficial adviser. It is a task she has performed for decades, first when Joe Biden was in the senate for 36 years and then as second lady during the Obama administration.
But there are risks to aligning Jill Biden with policy areas that could become contentious, such as immigration and school reopenings, as evidenced by the torrid time that Hillary Clinton had as first lady. Clinton spearheaded the White House’s doomed effort to reform healthcare, and took the blame when it failed in 1994, turning her into a figurehead for Republican hatred that persists to this day.
“Most first ladies are very, very careful with what they do within the policy realm,” said Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers who attended the Connecticut school visit with Biden. “[They] have tremendous soft power, and Jill Biden is very careful and very adept at how she uses it.”
The president often recalls how he first saw his wife, then 23, in a billboard advertisement at Wilmington airport. A widowed senator, he procured her number and the pair dated for a few years before his two young sons suggested their father propose.
After half-a-dozen unsuccessful proposal attempts, Jill Biden finally said yes, catapulting the late twenty-something into the role of senator’s wife and mother to two young boys. She and Joe Biden had a daughter, Ashley, a few years later.
Jill Biden has not always supported her husband’s long-held presidential ambitions. In 2003, she paraded past his advisers in a bikini with the word ‘No’ scrawled on her abdomen to demonstrate her opposition to a potential run in 2004.
But she played an active role in her husband’s 2020 bid for the presidency, leaving her job as a teacher to join the campaign full time and advising on important decisions, including the selection of Kamala Harris as a running mate.
Tony Cárdenas, a Democratic congressman from California who is a member of the Hispanic congressional caucus, said his conference forged a relationship with Jill Biden during the campaign to ensure they had a direct line to her husband.
Cárdenas said there was a “big difference between talking to somebody who’s part of the team and staff and somebody who gets to talk to him every night”.
Kate Andersen Brower, a presidential historian and author of five books including First Women, said Jill Biden entered the role of first lady with much more experience than Melania Trump, and would give the president “the back-up and support to get things done”.
“Jill has been in Washington and in this world for so many decades,” added Brower. “She knows what she has to do.”
Jill Biden will be the first occupant of the role to keep a professional paying job outside the White House, teaching writing at Northern Virginia Community College, a job she held full-time while her husband was vice-president.
In her White House role, Biden, who asks people to call her “Jill”, has cast herself as a healer, a role she thinks she can play in the school reopening debate.
The optics of Jill Biden’s school visit were important at a time of rancour over the speed of school reopenings, said Weingarten from the American Federation of Teachers, who said some Republicans were “trying to exploit this frustration” and “pit people against one another”.
Laura Bush, also a former teacher, helped to promote her husband’s education policies too. But Anita McBride, chief of staff to the first lady during George W Bush’s administration, made a distinction between their approaches.
Whereas Bush has used “her platform to advocate for the administration’s priorities” on education, Jill Biden was taking a more active and vocal role when it came to shaping the policy, she said. McBride compared Jill Biden to Betty Ford who “talked about some pretty controversial things and was quite comfortable doing so”.
“Clearly [Biden] is an activist first lady and is very comfortable in that,” McBride said.