Jill Biden Is Chasing the President’s Most Elusive Campaign Promise: Unity

WASHINGTON — The summer was a rough one for President Biden.

Another pandemic surge prompted Mr. Biden, a veteran moderate, to attack Republican governors and embrace vaccine mandates. A bipartisan infrastructure deal hung in the balance. The American withdrawal from Afghanistan, during which 13 service members were killed in a terrorist attack, was criticized as violent and haphazard.

But the events left another Biden feeling bruised.

“I love him, and it’s hurtful,” Jill Biden said in an interview, the first she has granted to a newspaper since becoming first lady. “I do feel the sting of it. I wouldn’t be a good partner if I didn’t.”

Eight months into Mr. Biden’s presidency, both husband and wife are finding that winning the “battle for the soul of the nation” is perhaps his most elusive campaign promise. In Washington, an outrage-driven approach to politics has replaced Mr. Biden’s rose-colored belief that bipartisan deal making can be an art form. As he tries to prove that this is still possible, his wife is not a bystander.

Dr. Biden, an English and writing professor who made history as the only first lady to keep her career while in the White House, has traveled to 32 states, many of them conservative, to promote school reopenings, infrastructure funding, community colleges and support for military families. She has also traveled to states where low numbers of eligible people have received the coronavirus vaccine.

During a trip to Mississippi in June, she told an audience gathered at a community college in Jackson that the state’s 30 percent vaccination rate was “not enough,” and stressed that the vaccines were safe. Later that day, she told a supportive crowd gathered at a distillery in Nashville that only three in 10 Tennesseans were vaccinated. The attendees began booing.

“Well, you’re booing yourselves,” the first lady told them. They quieted down.

Dr. Biden entered the White House with several focus areas, including supporting free community college. The president said this spring that she would be “deeply involved” in the effort to make community college tuition free. So far, she is not deeply engaged in the legislative or policy arenas. After this article was published online on Sunday evening, Elizabeth Alexander, her communications director, said that Dr. Biden’s work to raise awareness on the issue “is a big reason why it’s in the legislative package today.”

“He trusts my intuition as a spouse,” Dr. Biden said in the interview, “not as a policy person or an adviser.”

On Wednesday, she visited Wisconsin and Iowa on a day trip meant to promote the infrastructure deal. She climbed six sets of airplane stairs and participated in photo lines, a bit wobbly on her left foot from an injury over the summer.

“We can’t know what the future holds, but we know what we owe our children,” she told a crowd of parents and teachers at an elementary school in Milwaukee. “We owe them unity, so we can fight the virus, not each other.”

Despite pleas from the Bidens for Americans to overcome their differences during a devastating pandemic, there is evidence everywhere that the country is no more united than it was when Mr. Biden took office: As Dr. Biden graded a stack of essays in her plane cabin on Wednesday, her TV was tuned to a CNN report that said more than half of Americans believe democracy is under attack.

They are sometimes confronted with the reality that Mr. Biden’s decisions have been politically costly. When the first couple met with Gold Star families after a terrorist attack in Kabul last month, some relatives made it a point to publicly embrace former President Donald J. Trump.

The Bidens have grown accustomed to seeing obscenity-laden signs along both of their motorcade routes. When the first lady visited a school in Erie County, Pa., early in the administration, a crowd had gathered outside with a large Biden sign that had been defaced with an expletive.

“They think it makes sense for us to be in this kind of thing, where you ride down the street and someone has a sign?” Mr. Biden complained last week during a visit to Shanksville, Pa. “It’s not who we are.”

It was also the sort of thing that could have drawn a saltier response from Dr. Biden, a veteran campaign spouse, as little as a year ago. More than once she has physically put herself between Mr. Biden and detractors. In February 2020, she rushed a heckler, backing him up and away from her husband. (“I’m a good Philly girl,” the Hammonton, N.J., native told reporters that night.) During a Biden rally a month later in Los Angeles, she physically put herself between a pair of protesters and Mr. Biden.

She is a self-described keeper of family grudges: According to several aides, she was at first reluctant about Mr. Biden choosing Kamala Harris, who attacked him during a primary debate, as a running mate. Dr. Biden has never denied a report that she used an expletive to describe Ms. Harris’s decision to criticize her husband that night, but has said that everyone involved had “moved on.”