Last week US Vogue divided the people. On one side, the credulous liberals were delighted at the magazine’s decision to put first lady Jill Biden on the cover – this was the coronation the Bidens deserve, so they say. Meanwhile, those sceptical of Biden’s bid for the White House – a broad coalition of Democrats who believe he is too old, and Republicans who abhor him regardless of his age – were horrified. Jill Biden looked high-handed in a white suit beside the caption: “We will decide our future.”
I share the latter group’s discomfort, particularly with the caption. Who is this “we” that will decide the future? Women? (Not true!) Readers of Vogue? (Definitely not true.) The media? (Closer to reality, I suppose, but certainly not a foregone conclusion.) This cover is an image of liberal imperium: the Biden camp declaring the future of America’s soul via Vogue, the crown jewel of the liberal media complex. It was destined to put a lot of noses out of joint.
The accompanying article is somehow worse, like West Wing fan-fiction, hero-worshipping the first lady with no dose of the scepticism you might expect from a journalist. She is relaxed, the article reports (“call me Jill”); that she keeps her position as a teacher in a small college is apparently, so we are told, a “huge monumental big deal”; so many people are “jockeying to be heard” in the US, the profile contends, but no one is listening, “except, it seems, Jill Biden”. It presents Mrs Biden as the last bulwark against the authoritarian nightmare of Trump; and the last hope for the blue-skied utopia of a Biden second term; both a peerless operator and a cool girl. This kind of Pravda-esque paean should not have found a home in the pages of Condé Nast.
And it is precisely stunts like this that generate suspicion of these kinds of Democrats. Vogue has provided us with a portrait of the Biden camp that sees itself above the voter; who organise the world into those on the right and wrong side of history; and who believe the electoral cohort that does not support them has simply been deceived by a dishonest cabal of politicians. They cannot entertain for a moment, so it seems, that some people may have a real reason not to vote for Biden. No matter whether their assessment of the American voter is right (I am suspicious); we have reams of evidence – Brexit, Trump – to suggest this attitude is terribly self-defeating.
But Jill Biden should not be pilloried as the ultimate villain here. Though, of course, she has been. She was compared to Elena Ceausescu – wife of Nicolae Ceausescu, the general secretary of the Romanian Communist Party and alleged master puppeteer behind the whole regime. Even worse, the cover has been compared to a 2010 profile in the same magazine of Asma al-Assad, wife of Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad. Vogue called her a rose in the desert shortly before her husband began a brutal crackdown in Syria. Jill Biden’s cover may have been ill-advised and poorly timed, but these comparisons are obviously hysterical, scurrilous and with no sense of moral proportion.
But of course we have long been addicted to the story of the Machiavellian woman, pulling the strings of the hapless male counterpart. The Lady Macbeth analogues are litany: the Shakespearean woman anti-hero who, in pursuit of the highest power, pushes her husband deeper and deeper into murderous plotting. Agrippina the younger, emperor Nero’s mother, is cast as the ruthless and ambitious woman who pulled the levers of the state to manoeuvre Nero into succession, only to control him further from there. From the 5th century BCE rendering of Medea to Gone Girl in 2014, this is a characterisation of women we find safe and easy to understand. Even the BBC casts a conspiratorial tone, referring to the “quiet influence” of the first lady.
[ Maureen Dowd: Joe Biden is jeopardising the democracy he wants to saveOpens in new window ]
There are plenty of caveats. First, Biden is too old and not up to task. Second, his wife should be urging him to cede the nomination (not likely: “she really believes in her husband’s ability to get things done for the American people”). And third, if the Democrats really believe Trump is as dangerous as they say it is then there is a moral imperative to do everything to push Biden aside, leaving room for a legitimate candidate to take his place.
But Biden is surrounded by a coterie of loyalists and staffers; those who did a good job at hiding his age and condition from the world until it was, probably, too late; a Democrat party that maintained a conspiracy of silence around what everyone knew was a problem for longer than anyone was brave enough to express; and a liberal media that shared this omerta about Biden’s age until his presidential debate performance against Donald Trump, when apparently everyone decided together it was time to vocalise the long-held concern. It is a ludicrous assumption, given this ecosystem, that the ultimate blame for this sorry situation falls squarely at Jill Biden’s feet. But the story of one manipulative woman holding the US to ransom is far better than the story of dysfunction in the Democratic Party machinery.