Is Dr Jill Behind It All?

One question keeps pestering me. We have the most famous assessment of Joe's capabilities from Barack Obama -- "Don't underestimate Joe's ability to [mess] things up" -- but this piece from 2020 on the eve of Biden's nomination goes farther:

Interviews with dozens of senior officials of the Obama-Biden administration painted a picture of eight years during which the president and vice president enjoyed a genuinely close personal relationship, built particularly around devotion to family, while at the same time many senior aides, sometimes tacitly encouraged by the president’s behavior, dismissed Biden as eccentric and a practitioner of an old, outmoded style of politics.

“You could certainly see technocratic eye-rolling at times,” said Jen Psaki, the former White House communications director. Young White House aides frequently mocked Biden’s gaffes and lack of discipline in comparison to the almost clerical Obama. They would chortle at how Biden, like an elderly uncle at Thanksgiving, would launch into extended monologues that everyone had heard before.

Former administration officials treated Biden dismissively in their memoirs.

The link cites characterizations from Ben Rhodes and James Comey, but it doesn't mention the better-known observation from Robert Gates, "I think he has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.”

So far, we're seeing the consequences of those character traits, which appear to have been well known to many people in the administration at the time he was vice president. Whether his current condition represents a deterioration since then is an intriguing question. But I find recent vignettes involving his wife, Dr Jill, unsettling. The first is this one:

“No, he’s not losing in all the battleground states,” she told “CBS Mornings” [on April 3] when asked about a poll showing Joe losing to Donald Trump in six of seven battleground states and tied in Wisconsin. “He’s coming up even or doing better … It’s obvious that Joe will win this election.”

But this echoes Joe's own remarks on the polls since last year:

Three times now in a little over a month, Biden has dismissed polls that show him trailing Trump or other potential GOP rivals and insisted that reporters aren’t getting the full picture.

On Sunday [December 17]as he was leaving his campaign headquarters in Wilmington, Del., Biden responded to a shouted question from a reporter about why he’s losing to Trump in the polls.

“You’re reading the wrong polls,” Biden said.

. . . At a Chicago fundraiser on Nov. 9, Biden told donors that while “the press has been talking about two polls ... there are 10 other polls we’re winning,” according to a pool report.

. . . Earlier that same day, Biden told reporters at Maryland’s Joint Base Andrews that reporters “don’t read the polls.”

“Ten polls. Eight of them I’m beating him in those states. Eight of them. You guys only do two, CNN and New York Times,” Biden said.

So who is telling Joe this stuff? It's hard to eliminate Dr Jill as a suspect. But more recently, we have indications that she's driving Israel-Hamas policy:

And now we hear that the first lady has been pressuring her husband on Israel’s war on Hamas with these words: “Stop it. Stop it now, Joe.”

At a Ramadan event at the White House last week, Joe Biden reportedly told attendees about Jill’s sophisticated geopolitical advice.

The New York Times report was titled “Jill Biden Privately Urges an End to Conflict in Gaza.” Lo and behold, over the weekend Israel withdrew all its ground troops from southern Gaza, a move characterized by the White House as a “rest and refit” for the troops.

Commentators have been puzzling over the question of who pulls Joe's strings -- their surmise falls most frequently on Barack Obama, but we simply have too much evidence that Obama, who knew Joe pretty well, never thought much of him, and neither did people in Obama's inner circle. I think they had a pretty clear idea that if you pulled a string that they thought would control his hand, it would instead throw his knee out of joint or something, As a puppet, he's defective merchandise.

So who's the real puppeteer, and to what end? The same link raises one possibility:

A lot of women look at Jill and wonder how she can allow her husband to keep bumbling around and falling over on camera.

A Nancy Reagan would have been by his side like a limpet, ensuring his dignity was preserved, or at least insisting that staffers take up the slack, instead of leaving the leader of the free world looking like an escapee from a geriatric care facility.

Caught on the tarmac once helping him get into a jacket when he seemed to have forgotten what armholes are, Jill looked more exasperated than solicitous. It is a difficult situation, for sure, but the wise counsel she should have given Joe was not to run for a second term.

Instead she continues to enable his behavior and revel in the perks, jetting around the world solo on Air Force One to a wedding in Jordan or to meet the president of Namibia.

It cites some of Hunter's estimates -- again, he must know his stepmother about as well as anyone:

He once called her “a f–king moron” in a series of texts he sent his uncle Jim.

Hunter claimed he told Jill: “The drunkest I’ve ever been is still smarter than you could ever even comprehend and you’re a shut [sic] grammar teacher that wouldn’t survive one class in a ivy graduate program.”

Elsewhere,

Hunter Biden lashed out at first lady Jill Biden in a 2018 text message to his romantic partner and late brother’s widow, calling her a “selfish silly entitled c[***].”

“Go f**k yourself,” Hunter said in mockery of Dr. Jill Biden’s acclaimed teaching prowess, the Sun reported Friday from the “laptop from hell.

I continue to think theories of Biden's mental decline neglect evidence that he's never been especially capable, to the extent that as we've seen, he'll sell himself out for relatively trivial amounts -- and beyond that, for much of his adult life, he's allowed himself to be manipulated by his second wife, who herself isn't especially bright. The big question for me is when, if ever, we'll hear from others with insight into the personal dynamics involved.