She finally relented: Biden was chosen vice president of President Barack Obama in 2008, after an unsuccessful presidential race. As a second lady, she appreciated the relative anonymity of the education provided, noting in interviews that her students often did not recognize her. In fact, on the Rate My Professors website, alumni have more to say about their teaching style (“difficult leveling is common”) than their connection to two presidential administrations.
But on Wednesday, Dr. Biden arrived at the White House with a higher profile, a platform similar to the one she had as second lady, and an east wing stocked with advisers she trusts. They include Anthony Bernal, a senior adviser who has been with the Bidens since the Obama campaign. Julissa Reynoso Pantaleón, a former student at the Obama State Department, is his chief of staff.
Last week, Biden appointed Rory Brosius, a former Biden campaign advisor, as director of the United Forces initiative, a program to support military families that Biden started with Michelle Obama when she was first lady. Dr. Biden is also expected to promote a free community college and raise awareness of breast cancer prevention, the advisers said.
“She is not going to walk in the door and ask, ‘What is my identity as first lady?'” Shailagh Murray, former adviser to Biden and Obama, said in an interview. “It’ll just be the first lady’s version of what she’s been doing all along.”
Born in New Jersey, Dr. Biden grew up in Willow Grove, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Philadelphia. Frankly speaking with a Philadelphia accent, Dr. Biden approached her new role with the same folk touch that her husband often uses – “Call me Jill!” she said last week to allies who joined her on a call from Zoom. But she has flashes of courage: during the presidential campaign, she placed herself between her husband, 77 at the time, and a group of rebel vegan protesters.
“I remember every offense committed against the people I love,” she wrote in her memoirs, establishing herself as the protector of the family, if not its primary grudge keeper.
After a brief first marriage, Dr. Biden married Mr. Biden in 1977, more than four years after his first wife, Neilia, and his daughter, Naomi, died in a car accident. She put her own career ambitions on hold to raise her two children, Beau, a Delaware attorney general who died in 2015, and Hunter, as her own. The Bidens’ daughter Ashley was born in 1981.