David’s view
“Every family has its own mythology,” Jill Biden wrote in her first memoir. Her second, released this week, digs through the East Wing’s rubble to rescue that mythology from the debacle of 2024.
The former First Lady has some things in common right now with a Maine oyster farmer and political neophyte who’s running for Senate. Both Jill Biden and Graham Platner have highly scrutinized marriages (and families) that have made them political celebrities. And both argue that the public interest in their past missteps is a waste of time.
“Amy and I have a very loving and very happy marriage,” Platner told reporters on Sunday after reports of sexual texts to other women walloped his campaign with new questions. “Establishment media outlets,” he said, were obsessed with personal “gossip” about him.
It’s enough to make Democrats bristle at the sound of their names. The party resents being asked about Biden or Platner, resents that the political press can’t point its cameras somewhere else.
That resentment is only a problem when a candidate loses or drops out. But the Biden-Platner defiance in the face of personal baggage points to a clear difference between the two parties when it comes to what disqualifies a candidate.
Political operatives’ view of survivable scandal was transformed completely by President Donald Trump, then transformed again. Republicans can be convinced that negative stories about their candidates are media put-ons, and Democrats are a little envious that their voters haven’t adopted the same attitude of ignore, fight, move on, maybe sue.
“How do you expect to win back men when you go back through somebody’s Reddit history and just pull it all out and say: ‘Oh my God, this person has no right to ever be in politics?’” Platner told me last year, after the first media dive into his history of polarizing social media posts and unfortunate body art.
Platner is navigating this mess with a notably shallow reserve of goodwill, even among his backers on the left. “Is he a saint? I guess not,” said Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt. “I don’t know too many saints here.”
Jill and Joe Biden are in a different position: Their story is over. From the 1972 death of the future president’s first wife and daughter in a car crash to the 2015 death of his oldest son, the Biden legend became that of a family strengthened by every kind of hurt.
Plagiarizing the leader of Britain’s Labour Party? Embarrassing, but it built character, if you read Jill Biden. (In her first memoir, she wrote that her husband was merely “accused” of pilfering from a speech.)
Falsely claiming that he “marched” in the civil rights movement? He made up for that with a commitment to fighting racial inequality and benches of Black judges who’ll serve for decades.
Their son’s drug addiction? Hunter Biden struggled “like a lot of people we know,” in the Bidens’ words, and his one-time drug warrior father would take new empathy into the White House.
Democrats gave the Bidens some grace, standing with them as their surviving children had their dirty laundry stolen and published online. That was a traumatic risk that paid off in 2020. The bill arrived four years later.
View from the East Wing is not just unapologetic about the Bidens’ decision to seek another term and its perks. It suggests that Joe Biden made painful sacrifices that were not appreciated enough, for people who let him down.
Having stuck with him through unfair scrutiny, Democrats then subjected him to fair scrutiny — questions about whether a man who struggled to perform the public duties of a president could do them into his late 80s.
But they also defended Biden first. Jill Biden misses that, which is understandable. Platner and the progressives who support him, who already helped him topple a Democratic governor in his primary, wonder if he will get the same kind of grace.
Voters have a habit of being furious at scoundrels, then deciding that they got a raw deal. While the former First Lady flogged her book, her son joined X, where he was getting millions of views for jokes about his drug use. Democrats thought Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. had 86’d himself from public life with memorable tabloid scandals. But he hadn’t.
The Bidens’ sin was not a specific misbehavior. It was frailty that became a problem for the party, which Jill Biden still refuses to be honest about.
“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,” she writes of her husband. “And if he were to step down before the end of a second term, he would have handed the reins to Kamala.”
Her claim is laughable. But her implication isn’t wrong; had Joe Biden won in 2024, all of the work Democrats did defending their misbehavior would have been worth it. It’s the exact same calculation the party is now working through for Platner.
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Room for Disagreement
Plenty of progressives believe that Platner’s predicament comes down to a scandal addiction in the media that voters don’t share.
On Tuesday afternoon, when Platner met with the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee near the Hill, Sanders chastised GOP staffers and reporters, for obsessing over Platner while they put up with Trump’s flexible morals. In his newsletter, Ken Klippenstein defended Platner from a political establishment that he argues will only reward bland, flaw-free candidates.
“People are done with the clean-cut types who’ve harbored ambitions for political office since they were on high school student council and have lived every waking moment accordingly,” Klippenstein writes.
Notable
- For CNN, 2024 debate moderator Jake Tapper challenges Jill Biden’s version of events. “This nation’s history is full of examples of politicians who considered themselves selfless and self-aware who refused to give up power.”
- In The Argument, Jerusalem Demsas explains why accusations of flirting outside of his marriage would be more damaging than the other stories excavated from his online history.