After Democrats formally nominated Joe Biden as their presidential candidate at the National Democratic Convention on Tuesday night, his wife, Dr. Jill Biden, gave a personal speech at the Delaware high school where she used to teach. She encouraged Americans to vote for her husband, highlighting that Biden was capable of “honest leadership.”

“As a mother and a grandmother, as an American, I am heartbroken by the magnitude of this loss. By the failure to protect our communities. By every precious and irreplaceable life gone,” she said. “Like so many of you, I’m left asking: How do I keep my family safe?”

Standing in the empty hallways of the Wilmington high school where she once taught English, Dr. Biden, who has a doctoral degree in education, spoke about the current coronavirus crisis, its impact on education and the closure of schools across the country.

“I hear it from so many of you – the frustration of parents juggling work while they support their children’s learning,” she said. “The despair in the lines that stretch out before food banks, and the indescribable sorrow that follows every lonely last breath that follows when the ventilators turn off,” she said.

Subscribe to our free weekly newsletter!

A week of political news in your in-box.
We find the news you need to know, so you don't have to.

She urged Americans to choose her husband as president so that schools’ hallways “will ring out with laughter and possibility once again.”

“The burdens we carry are heavy, and we need someone with strong shoulders,” Dr. Biden said. “If we entrust this nation to Joe, he will do for your family what he did for ours: Bring us together and make us whole, carry us forward in our time of need, keep the promise of America for all of us.”

Dr. Biden and Joe Biden got married four years after he lost his wife and daughter in a car accident in 1972. She talked about the challenges their family went through when they lost their son Beau to brain cancer in 2015 and praised her husband for resilience amid the time of grief. She remembered her husband still doing his duty as a vice president, just four days after Beau’s funeral, “shave and put on his suit” and “walk out into a world empty of our son.”

“There are times when I couldn’t imagine how he did it – how he put one foot in front of the other and kept going,” Dr. Biden said. “But I’ve always understood why he did it.”

“He does it for you,” she added.

She confidently argued that her husband’s presidency will be an “honest leadership” and will help the country to recover from the pandemic.

“We just need leadership worthy or our nation and worthy of you, honest leadership to bring us back together to recover from this pandemic and prepared for whatever else is next,” she said.

Read more about:

Get the free uPolitics mobile app for the latest political news and videos

iPhone Android

Leave a comment