Park City • Urging support for President Joe Biden’s reelection bid, first lady Jill Biden told a welcoming group of donors in Park City that she wanted to take them back eight years into history.
“I want you to remember what it felt like on the morning after that 2016 election when we fell short. Remember that feeling?” she asked. “Remember when you woke up? And you said, ‘Oh, my God, what just happened?’ We can’t let that happen again.”
Promising to uphold Americans’ rights and reinstate rights that have been lost, she pledged to ”do incredible things together. We will uphold the rule of law. We will restore a woman’s freedom to make her own health care decisions. We will defend our democracy and together guess what? We are going to win this election.”
Biden spoke on behalf of the Biden Victory Fund at the mountain top home of Mark and Nancy Gilbert, where the president had solicited support in August. Mark Gilbert served as the U.S. ambassador to New Zealand and Samoa, appointed by former President Barack Obama in 2014.
Following her brief visit, she made another stop for the fund at the Park City home of Glenn and Susan Rothman. Glenn Rothman is the CEO of Hearts on Fire, a luxury diamond jewelry brand.
Earlier in the day, she spoke at Hunter High School in West Valley City about the importance of supporting educators’ wellness.
At the Gilberts’ home, Nancy Gilbert told about 100 guests: ”Some of you aren’t [Democrats] but you are here today because you care about defending democracy. You care about a woman’s right to choose, about justice and fairness and you care about our country.”
As Biden stepped up to a podium, she was met with applause and chants of “four more years!” The president is in the second half of his first term as president and was vice president from 2009-2017.
This election is unlike any she’s ever witnessed, Biden said, because she believes that what’s at stake is democracy itself.
”As my husband said, ‘Democracies don’t have to die at the end of a rifle. They can die slowly, subtly, silently, one freedom one right at a time. One hope at a time,” she said. ”A court decision, a voting law, a big lie repeated over and over and over again. The temperature gradually increasing, unnoticed by many until the pot has boiled over.“
The days of ”simple policy differences” and “good faith debates” are in the past, she said. “Today, it’s about the survival of America’s democracy, a battle for the soul of this nation, between those of us in this room and the hundreds of millions more across the country.”
She praised the president’s record, saying, ”anybody can tell you what they want to do. But Joe Biden can tell you what he’s done. He passed the boldest climate legislation in America. He guided one of the strongest economic recoveries in modern history. He battled Big Pharma and he won.”
In December, the president announced that dozens of pharmaceutical companies will be required to pay rebates to Medicare for price hikes on prescription drugs under the Inflation Reduction Act, which also allows the federal government to directly negotiate lower drug prices for enrollees, among other measures.
At the Rothman home, she spoke in a more intimate setting to about 25 donors over dinner, recalling meeting her husband and declining his first four proposals. In the spring of 1977, she said, the then-senator gave her a “ultimatum”: he was leaving for 10 days and wanted an answer when he returned.
”I was unquestionably in love, but after a painful earlier divorce, I was also scared and hardened to the difficulty and the fragility of relationships,” she said, and wary he wouldn’t have “room” for her after losing his first wife, Neilia Hunter Biden, in 1972.
“Joe made it clear that there was room enough in his heart for both of us,” Biden said. He shows the same quality of character as president that he has in their marriage, she said.
“Always unflappable, always unflinching,” Biden said. “You see that in his character and through the highs and lows of this country, of this world ... I’m so proud and so grateful, really, that Joe is our president during these uncertain, unpredictable and tumultuous times.”
Biden also asked her small audience to remember how it felt to lose the election in 2016 and see former President Donald Trump take office. “And that’s why we’re here,” she said. “That’s why we have to start early. And that’s why we have to work harder than we’ve ever worked before.“
She added: “We have to meet this moment as if our rights are at stake ... as if our democracy is on the line because, guess what, it is.”
