Chapter 6
We built one cold little studio on the back patio and another in the basement so Joe and I could both do back-to-back Zooms all day.
To bring people together and get Joe’s message out, the campaign got creative.
At car rallies, fashioned after drive-in movie theaters, the enthusiasm came through: “Honk if you want America to be united again!” We held these rallies all over Pennsylvania, Michigan, Florida, and Ohio.
One Toledo event with autoworkers was held outside a union hall.
She’d gone viral in April for the Quarantine Cosmo, which I think kept a large part of the country tipsy throughout the spring. She started with two cups of vodka and one cup of Cointreau. “You need a big pitcher… You never know who’s stopping by,” she said. “Wait a minute—nobody’s stopping by!”
As it became safer to travel, we put exacting COVID protocols in place. The campaign paid to test us all daily. Our temperature was taken before we got onto the plane—a biometric boarding pass. We wore masks and gloves to keep ourselves safe and to set an example.
While I spent time talking to voters about Joe, we often joined local pandemic aid efforts.
I will never forget the depth of the wounds.
Many middle-class families had to turn to food banks.
As we loaded their cars, drivers told me that they had never asked for help before, but they’d been pushed to the brink.
People were struggling in so many ways. They were afraid of getting sick, wondering how they were going to afford food, and they were scared for their kids. Nurses and doctors were overwhelmed by the overcrowding at hospitals and were unable to get the personal protective equipment they needed.
The economy had been devastated. One woman came up to me on the campaign trail and said that her husband, a farmer, had seen his livelihood destroyed by tariffs.
“The first time we had trouble, he was okay,” she said.
“The second time, he just couldn’t endure it.
He killed himself. I’m left with the farm, and I’m not sure what I’m going to do. ”
People kept saying they were sick of holding their breath, wondering what outrageous thing the president would do next. They wanted to be able to breathe again.
Throughout the 2020 campaign, Joe promised that, if elected, his administration and cabinet would “look like the country.” He committed to putting a Black woman on the Supreme Court and to picking a woman as his running mate.
I was proud of Joe. It was time. He would do what no Democrat had done since Walter Mondale asked Geraldine Ferraro to be on his ticket back in 1984.
Once Joe was the official nominee, the campaign staff began generating names to consider as his potential running mate.
Candidates on their first list included Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar, Florida Congresswoman Val Demings, California Congresswoman Karen Bass, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, California Senator Kamala Harris, Rhode Island Governor Gina Raimondo, Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, Illinois Senator Tammy Duckworth, former Georgia House Minority Leader Stacey Abrams, and Obama’s national security advisor, Susan Rice. They were all vetted.
Joe asked me to sit in on the candidate meetings so that he could ask for my impressions later.
Most of the meetings with the candidates were on Zoom, but we were able to arrange a couple of in-person visits.
Gretchen Whitmer came to Rehoboth Beach, Delaware.
She flew in secretly by jet with her state’s lead police officer, and we interviewed her at the house.
I liked her story. I liked her grit. I liked her strength.
Former police chief and Florida Congresswoman Val Demings, I loved.
She’s from Jacksonville. In March, I had a great day on the primary trail with Val and her husband, Jerry, mayor of Orange County and the former county sheriff.
They have three children and five grandchildren, and she rides motorcycles.
She took me with one of her granddaughters to a church service with a DJ and rock music.
The service was broadcast all over the state, and thousands of people tuned in.
I found the energy in that place of worship particularly refreshing, because I was raised Presbyterian.
We sat in the pews and nobody said a word.
You didn’t look around. You just sat there and thought to yourself about who in your row was singing the loudest—it was always my grandmother.
I first heard Kamala Harris’s name around 2011.
One Sunday dinner, Beau told us about her: “Mom, I met someone to watch! Her name is Kamala Harris.” They were both attorneys general, working together on the post–financial crisis multistate mortgage fraud and foreclosure settlement.
He had high praise for her. Joe and I took note the way you do when your kids tell you about something that impresses them.
She went on to be elected senator of California and began to look at a presidential run.
Then, in the June 2019 debate, Kamala had turned to Joe and criticized him for how he’d voted on busing as a way to desegregate schools.
Her sharp conclusion: “There was a little girl in California who was part of the second class to integrate her public schools, and she was bused to school every day. That little girl was me.”
The thought bubble above my head was full of expletives, but sitting in the crowd that night, I knew I couldn’t let anyone see me react.
I could see Joe was caught off guard, surprised to be hit with what amounted to a “gotcha” moment.
“I did not oppose busing in America,” Joe said. “What I opposed is busing ordered by the Department of Education. That’s what I opposed… I ran because of civil rights… I’m the guy that extended the voting rights for twenty-five years.”
But of course the clip that ran the day after the debate was Kamala turning to Joe and implying that his busing policy—a stance not all that different from her own—made him a racist. To me, it seemed like hypocritical point-scoring.
Joe had long enjoyed strong support from Black voters, particularly older Black voters, because he’d fought alongside them for decades even against stiff opposition.
As a senator, he’d pushed to get federal investment into Black neighborhoods and to unify areas that had been torn apart by highways put there by eminent domain.
As president, Joe would keep his promise to promote diversity on federal benches, appointing sixty-three Black judges, including forty women, to lifetime appointments, and to put the first Black woman on the Supreme Court.
He would make Juneteenth a national holiday and sign the Emmett Till Antilynching Act.
In politics, you learn to let things go. Joe quickly moved on, and Kamala dropped out of the race in early December 2019.
Joe invited her to the Chain Bridge Road house for a meeting in person on July 27 to discuss the possibility of her becoming his running mate. She was warm and chatted easily with the staff about how she’d just made enchiladas with her husband, Doug Emhoff.
Right off the bat, Joe told Kamala she was one of the top choices.
She responded instantly by making a strong case for herself.
She mentioned the personal connection she felt to our family, and spoke about how much she’d cared about Beau.
After about half an hour, the meeting wrapped up.
Joe and I agreed that we were impressed by her. She was definitely in the running.
As pressure grew to announce Joe’s choice for VP—it’s customary to do this a couple of weeks before the convention—he said, “Let’s do this: You put your top three down on a piece of paper and I’ll put my top three, and we’ll seal them in separate envelopes.
” We did this four times—once a week, we would write down our choices, open the envelopes, and read the names.
The first three lists were completely different.
We never opened the last pair of envelopes.
Then it was time for him to make his choice. The envelope exercise was fun, but at the end of the day, I was Joe’s spouse. Of course he had to make the call on his own.
It had been a hard decision for Joe; the candidates all had their own set of strengths. But judging by the polls, and informed by the eight years he’d spent in the role himself, the choice was clear: Kamala Harris.
The video that introduced me at the 2020 Democratic National Convention—which had to take place mostly online—opened with the story of how Joe and I met.
“When I met Jill, I knew,” Joe recalled. “My brother said, ‘There’s this woman. You’d really like her, Joe,’ so I gave her a call and she had a date that night.” He said he’d asked me to break that date to go out with him instead. “And what’d you do?” He turned to me.
I said I’d called and told the other guy that I had a friend who’d come to town. I went out with Joe instead.
I loved that Joe was from a slightly earlier era than I was.
Dating after I divorced my first husband, I found some of the men I went out with took women’s liberation and free love as a sign that I was theirs to grope.
Unlike them, Joe respected me. He was gallant, and I looked up to him.
After our first date, he shook my hand goodnight.
I ran upstairs and called my mother at one o’clock in the morning.
“Mom,” I said, “I finally met a gentleman.”
He’s still that man. To this day, he calls me “his girl.” People who sit next to him at dinner have been known to come up to me afterward to say, “He loves you so much.” To which I say, “He talked your ear off, didn’t he?”
Joe was a thirty-year-old widower raising two boys, so our dates weren’t the usual courtship.
It was always the four of us going to the movies, to the beach, to dinner.
Joe said he was shaving one morning when the boys ran in before school and said, “Dad, we think it’s time to marry Jill.
” Joe proposed five times. The children had already been through so much.
I knew if I said yes, it would have to be forever, so I waited until I was absolutely sure.
On the fifth proposal, I said yes. The truth is that I loved him from the start.
Knowing that we wouldn’t be gathering in a large forum because of COVID, I chose to give my convention speech from my classroom at Brandywine High School in Wilmington, where I’d taught in the early 1990s.
In a green dress, I walked down the hallway and said, “I have always loved the sounds of a classroom. The quiet that sparks with possibility just before students shuffle in, the murmur of ideas bouncing back and forth as we explore the world together, the laughter and tiny moments of surprise you find in materials you’ve taught a million times. ”
The empty, silent school—with no scent of new notebooks or freshly waxed floors—to me conveyed the huge cost of the pandemic. What would get us to the other side of the crisis was taking care of one another.
“I never imagined at the age of twenty-six I would be asking myself, ‘How do you make a broken family whole?’ ” I said from that echoey school.
“Still, Joe always told the boys, ‘Mommy sent Jill to us.’ And how could I argue with her? And so we figured it out together… We found that love holds a family together. Love makes us flexible and resilient. It allows us to become more than ourselves, together, and though it can’t protect us from the sorrows of life, it gives us refuge, a home.
How do you make a broken family whole? The same way you make a nation whole: With love and understanding and with small acts of kindness.
With bravery, with unwavering faith. We show up for each other in big ways and small ones again and again…
“We just need leadership worthy of our nation. Worthy of you. Honest leadership to bring us back together, to recover from this pandemic and prepare for whatever else is next. Leadership to reimagine what our nation will be. That’s Joe.
He and Kamala will work as hard as you do every day to make this nation better.
And if I have the honor of serving as your First Lady, I will, too.
And with Joe as president, these classrooms will ring out with laughter and possibility once again. ”
In the weeks leading up to the election, when we held gatherings in person, we set out Hula-Hoops on the ground to help maintain distance.
I’d look out on the crowd of masked people, each one standing in their own Hula-Hoop, and think about how we were living in strange times.
I was also just so happy to be away from the computer screen.
In the presence of other people, I could feel the energy and support behind Joe.
I didn’t want to take anything for granted, but I believed that he would win.
The results weren’t final as states recounted, so Election Day became Election Week.
Held in suspense, we were hopeful, but wouldn’t allow ourselves to feel overly confident.
In Wilmington, I had a houseful of family—our kids and grandkids had been with us for days.
On Thursday, we turned up the music and started a kitchen dance party to relieve some tension.
Yet in the background was the ever-present Steve Kornacki in those tan slacks, standing before that whiteboard.
Had he changed clothes? Had he showered? Had he slept? Was he human?
Late on Saturday morning, Joe and I decided we had to get away from the TVs, so we filled up our coffee cups and went down to sit on the dock by the lake. We heard a roar coming from the house. The grandkids came running down the lawn screaming, “We won! We won!”
Joe had won. Decisively in both the popular vote and the Electoral College, and with historically high turnout from a broad coalition.
After so much instability, Joe would help the country finally get back to normal.
Nothing that election year had been normal.
The primary wasn’t normal because there were almost thirty Democratic candidates.
The campaign wasn’t normal because of COVID.
The win wasn’t normal because there was no concession.
Nothing followed the normal pattern. So we should not have been surprised that the inauguration wouldn’t be normal either.