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Aides say she is “happy and honored” to handle those traditional duties associated with being a first lady: dinner, standing next to the president at state occasions, etc., but she also modernizes the role for both future first lady. The overseas trip is the latest evidence of her focus.
“She doesn’t want to go there and have people just write about her dresses and clothes. When she travels with her husband, she also wants to do substantial things on her own,” said an aide familiar with her planning and thinking. “She will play the ceremonial role but she has things she wants to do. She doesn’t want to just go and be arm candy. “
It is the operating motto of her office. Her first few months in office were a flurry of activity that proves the point. She’s gone on more than 20 trips, the vast majority of them alone, pushing with the message of recovering from the pandemic, visiting schools, and talking about a free community college and services for military families.
Taking office during the pandemic really fit Biden’s approach to the job. This has allowed her to elude some of the more celebratory aspects of being First Lady, like hosting parties, and focus instead on politics. It also allowed her and the president to play roles that Trump notably did not play: the consoling chief.
“I think we want someone who is real and can connect with us and deal with the struggles people are having with the economy and Covid and everything. I think that’s what you’re going to try to do: First Women: The Blessing and Power of Contemporary First Ladies in America,” said Kate Andersen Brewer, author of First Women: The Blessing and Power of Contemporary First Ladies in America. Bring this sympathy.
This sympathy is often shown during those trips. At a vaccine clinic in New Mexico in April, Biden thought a woman seemed afraid to get her vaccine, so he walked over to her and put her arm around the woman’s shoulder while receiving her injection.
There is also a sense that Biden is working to be a more accessible first lady than her predecessor.
“I think we tend to look at the president and first lady with that, usually with a sense of reverence and put them on that pedestal. I think it helps to have a sense of humor about yourself. Dr. Biden is supposed to have a good sense of humor.” On April Fools’ Day, Biden wore a short black wig, black face mask and a “Jasmine” badge on her T-shirt and handed out ice cream bars to reporters traveling with her until she laughed, revealing who she was.
This sense of normalcy is something she’s aware of, says an aide, but it’s also “d.b. being herself.” One aspect of being herself is continuing to teach English and writing at Northern Virginia Community College while balancing her official duties.
Years ago, this was a risky move: a first lady working or wanting to set up more substantial events on a foreign trip with her husband or at all. Most famously, Hillary Clinton has been repeatedly battered as the first lady for stepping out of bounds, most famously for leading the failed health care reform effort. There are no indications that Biden would go further than Clinton, who clearly had higher political aspirations. But keeping her day job still broke the mold.
“It’s hard for me to think of it from a historical perspective,” she said before inauguration day, noting that she “studyed all eight years as a second lady” from 2009 to 2016.
Biden may not take it publicly, but Brewer said she is slowly changing expectations for the role of the first lady of the United States: not too serious, objective on her own and independent. “I think she made this niche and probably because she has been waiting to do this work for decades. So she kind of feels comfortable with that,” Brewer said.
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