Former First Lady Dr. Jill Biden’s new memoir is reopening a debate many Democrats would rather leave behind.
The book, “View from the East Wing,” revisits the final months of President Joe Biden’s 2024 campaign and his decision to abandon his reelection bid. While Jill Biden continues to defend her husband’s fitness for office, some Democrats — including many former aides and allies — say the book revives a painful chapter at a time when the party wants voters focused on the future and the 2026 midterms.
Frustrations started mounting last week, when during an interview promoting her book on CBS News, Jill Biden said she feared her husband was having a stroke during the debate that was the fatal blow to his candidacy.
“I was frightened, because I had never ever seen Joe like that before or since. Never,” she said. “I don’t know what happened. As I watched it, I thought, ‘Oh, my God, he’s having a stroke.’ And it scared me to death.”
Despite that, Jill Biden writes that she continued to believe her husband was the best choice to lead the Democratic party into the 2024 election. But insiders beg to differ.
President Biden’s mental acuity in question
The debate performance sparked immediate concern among Democrats, even as the White House publicly pushed back against questions about Biden’s age and fitness for office.
In her memoir, Jill Biden acknowledges those questions, while defending her husband’s ability to serve.
“Even if he had slowed down in the years before his election bid, I believed in my heart that he was still good enough and wise enough and capable enough to govern,” she wrote. “He never wavered from his values, the same ones I grew up with. I believe that if his health had ever deteriorated to the point where he was no longer able to serve, he would have had the humility to admit that.”
Still, she also wrestles with the possibility that she may have missed signs of decline.
“Had he grown too old for the job and I hadn’t noticed? I didn’t think so, but could I be objective enough to be sure?”
What critics are saying
Many of the sharpest critiques have come from people who supported Biden.
“Ripping open a healing scab is never helpful,” John Morgan, a Florida attorney who was a major fundraiser for Biden’s 2024 campaign, told the Los Angeles Times.
He added, “If you like fiction it’s good.”
Morgan said Jill Biden’s claim that she never saw her husband perform that way before or after the debate “defies the smell test.”
CNN anchor Jake Tapper, co-author of “Original Sin,” which examines concerns about Biden’s mental acuity heading into the2024 race, put it this way:
“The most charitable interpretation of Jill Biden’s book, particularly the parts dealing with her husband’s aging, is that she’s having difficulty accepting what’s been happening to him for years. The less forgiving version is that she’s been enabling it and is now seeking to try to find an excuse for what we all saw, while also suggesting here and there that there’s much more than maybe even she’s willing to admit to herself.”
Unbiased. Straight Facts.TM
Top White House aides decided against having then-President Joe Biden undergo a cognitive test to prove his fitness for a second term.
‘I just wish they would give us more time and space’
Meanwhile, others within the Democratic party are less interested in debating the book’s accuracy than in ending the conversation altogether.
“We have a lot of momentum in our favor… and when we get pulled back into conversations about age and the election in ‘24, it’s never gonna be a good place for Democrats,” Megan Hays, a former aide to President Biden said in an interview on C-SPAN. “I think it is a tough place to be.”
Some of President Biden’s former aides spoke out about it as well, one telling Axios, “I just wish they would give some more time and space and let people move on. It all feels so disingenuous.”
Another former aide said both Jill Biden’s memoir and former Vice President Kamala Harris’ book, “107 Days,” leave the impression that key figures from the 2024 campaign continue to blame others for the loss.
“President Biden actually has a legacy that is impactful and should be celebrated at some point — getting us through the pandemic and passing life-changing bills,” the unnamed former senior official told Axios, “Why does he keep stepping on it himself?”
Will it matter in the midterms?
The November midterms are approaching quickly, and while many Democrats say the new book doesn’t help, they also don’t think it will affect the November elections.
Andrew Bates, who was a spokesman during the Biden administration, agrees that Jill Biden’s new book reopened a “painful conversation” for the Democratic party, but said he doesn’t feel like it’ll negatively impact Democrats come election day. Instead, he says those elections will be a “referendum on Republicans’ broken promises to end inflation and stop wars.”
On his podcast “Pod Save America,” progressive host Dan Pfeiffer said, “What I care about is what happens going forward. What bothers me the most is not the timeline of events, but whether Democratic leaders now will ever reckon with the massive breach of trust that came because of how all of that was handled.”
Round out your reading
- Plea bargains keep America’s courts running. Guilt or innocence barely matters.
- Trump says the media isn’t covering one of his biggest accomplishments. We checked.
- Mike Lindell denied MyPillow was hacked. Its private data is now online.
- Red meat allergy rises with ticks as HHS targets Lyme disease, alpha-gal syndrome.
- We’re building a new Straight Arrow. Help us shape our future by taking our survey.