| Резюме: | Jill Biden barnstormed the country during her debut year as first lady as if on a one-woman mission to help her husband’s administration tackle the problem of the moment: getting people vaccinated and boosted against the deadly COVID-19 pandemic. New headwinds blowing in year two — President Joe Biden’s low standing with the public and November elections that could put Republicans back in control of Congress — have set her on a fresh mission: working to help elect Democrats who can help her husband. She’s making no secret of her frustration with Washington. “Joe truly believes in working with Congress and getting things done, but obviously the Republicans are pulling together and they’re not budging. They are not budging,” the first lady said at one of four fundraisers she headlined in the past month. “Who would think that AR-15s make any sense for anything? Who doesn’t believe in the need to deal with climate change?” she said at a July fundraiser in Nantucket, Massachusetts, referencing Republican opposition to the president’s call for an assault weapons ban and more spending on climate change. With school out for the summer, the teacher-first lady was free to travel again in her role as the president’s chief surrogate, highlighting administration accomplishments and showing a more political side while testing possible fall campaign messages before audiences big and small. She put a voice to the urgency she and the president feel over unfinished aspects of his agenda. After accompanying him to the scene of deadly mass shootings at a grocery store in Buffalo, New York, and an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, the first lady — a community college professor — urged audiences to demand tougher gun laws from Congress. “We need to fight, now, for the lives of our children and for the safety of our schools,” she told the National PTA Convention in June, shortly after they visited Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, where 19 pupils and two teachers were killed by a man firing an AR-15. Congress represents “the will of the people,” she said, “and that’s why we need the people to speak up. Parents and teachers. All of us.” She raised the gun issue later at the American Federation of Teachers convention in Boston in July, saying that “we believe that AR-15s, the weapon that tore apart 19 children and two teachers in their classroom, have no place on our streets.” And she turned the Supreme Court’s decision overturning the constitutional right to an abortion into an argument for sending more Democrats to Congress come November. President Biden has promised to sign a bill enshrining the right to an abortion in federal law, but there isn’t enough support for it in Congress, where Democrats have slim majorities. “All of us have a teacher voice for when things go off the rails and now is the time to use it,” she said in Boston. In Nantucket, the first lady defended her spouse of 45 years, saying “he’s just had so many things thrown his way” that weren’t expected, including the abortion ruling and Russia’s war against Ukraine. “He had so many hopes and plans for things he wanted to do, but every time you turned around, he had to address the problems of the moment,” she told a group of about […]
The post Jill Biden Pounding the Campaign Trail for Democrats Ahead of Midterms appeared first on The Yeshiva World.
|