Who was joe bidens first wife professional#

But she can also look him in the eye and say, ‘Don’t do this.’ She can tell him the stuff that nobody wants to hear. “She respects and admires him, and she helps him be his best self. “Val’s been there-beginning, middle, and end morning, noon, and night,” Senator Christopher Coons (D-Del.), who now holds Biden’s old Senate seat and is a longtime family friend, told The Washington Post earlier this year. This year’s presidential campaign was run by Jen O’Malley Dillon-“This is the first time I haven’t managed the campaign, and, I want to tell you, it’s damn frustrating!” Owens reportedly joked at one campaign stop earlier this year-but Biden’s only sister remained a trusted, hands-on adviser. In 2008, he tried for the presidency again, again with Owens as his campaign manager, but dropped out after a dismal showing in Iowa, ultimately becoming Barack Obama’s running mate and then two-term vice president. He dropped out and returned to the Senate. They wanted to hear what he had to say.”īut the campaign was derailed when Biden was found to have plagiarized a speech by Neil Kinnock, a British politician.

“He was a strong, solid voice for the Democratic Party,” Owens told Frontline. Valerie was his campaign manager, one of the first women to run the campaign of a major presidential candidate. Later, in the midst of a successful career in the Senate, and after meeting and marrying Jill Jacobs, soon to be the first lady, Biden decided to run for president in 1988 and challenge the then vice president George H. Soon after, Valerie moved into the Biden household to help raise the children, doing so with the help of the Biden parents and the two other Biden brothers. Biden took his oath of office by the hospital bed of his two surviving sons, Beau and Hunter. Though a grief-stricken Biden was on the verge of resigning his newly won seat, the Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield convinced him to stay. His wife Neilia and their 13-month-old daughter, Naomi, were killed in a horrific car crash that also severely injured the couple’s two young sons.

In a decided upset, Biden won by just over 3,000 votes. “She got a lot of quality people really super involved.” “She was really good at the management part of the campaign,” Kaufman said. Owens’s first husband, Bruce Saunders, handled the budget.” Ted Kaufman, a former Biden aide, told the New York Times that Valerie Biden quickly proved a skilled campaign manager. Another, Frank Biden, managed volunteers. As The New York Times described it: “One brother, James Biden, took charge of raising money.

So we were running because whatever the senator was doing, Senator Boggs was doing, we thought were not effective in those-addressing those three problems that we looked at, that weren’t being handled the right way.”Īnd it was definitely a family affair. We were running for civil rights and civil liberties, for the environment, and to stop the war in Vietnam. She added: “We weren’t running against the man. House, and he was running for his third term.” The press called it the “Children’s Crusade.” “A lot of people thought it was a fool’s errand,” Owens told PBS’s Frontline this summer, pointing out that Boggs “had been twice governor, twice U.S.

Who was joe bidens first wife professional#

That first Senate campaign together-when Valerie was still a teacher at Wilmington Friends School and Joe was a city councilman-cemented the siblings’ professional relationship, as well as their personal one.