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Joe and Jill Biden's ‘regular’ lives

Vice President Joe Biden sometimes escapes from Washington by catching Amtrak to Wilmington, a place where folks still call him by his first name. His wife, Jill, balances her White House duties with a day job as an English professor at a community college, where she shares a cubicle with a colleague and holds regular office hours for her students.

He routinely goes out for pizza with friends and buys his button-downs at Brooks Brothers. She drops by the neighborhood Safeway to pick up fruit and takes long runs on Massachusetts Avenue. The couple often go to the movies. And, like normal people, occasionally they get turned away, as they were when “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” was sold out.

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Despite an official residence, a retinue of Secret Service officers protecting them and a schedule packed with vice presidential duties, Biden and his wife are living the semblance of a normal life that their neighbors a couple of miles away at the White House can only dream about. While President Barack Obama has complained that he misses casual walks around the block and first lady Michelle Obama told Oprah Winfrey she dreams of shopping at Target, Joe and Jill Biden have managed to hang on to their identities as regular people and explore Washington like the newcomers to the city they essentially are.

Biden has spent 36 years in the Senate and 2½ as vice president, but he and his wife are still tourists navigating Washington’s terrain. Unlike most lawmakers who live around the Capitol, then-Sen. Biden boarded the train each night for the 90-minute commute home, earning him the nickname “Amtrak Joe.” As a result, he is the first vice president to occupy the grounds of the Naval Observatory who hadn’t previously resided in Washington.

The couple now spend most weekdays at the Naval Observatory and split their weekends between Washington and Wilmington, where they have a house that the vice president helped design. It is there, at their lakeside home, that the Bidens feel most at ease, friends and family say.

But those same friends add that the Bidens are increasingly comfortable in Washington. They brought their casual style to Number One Observatory Circle, hanging their grandchildren’s artwork on the walls and decorating their pool house with Tiffany-blue walls and seashell displays. Friends say the Biden grandchildren are always over and, when the weather is warm, playing in the residence’s pool.

Of course, that doesn’t quite make the Bidens typical Americans. Their adjusted gross income of $379,178 in 2010 was more than $300,000 higher than the average American household, census data show. But by the standards of Washington’s clubby elite, they are nearly working-class outsiders — a status they embrace.

“Joe and Jill do normal things [because] they’re just regular people,” Valerie Biden Owens, the vice president’s sister, told POLITICO. “They love to go to the movies because they’ve always loved going to the movies. … When they go out, there’s little if any pomp and circumstance. It’s just not their style.”

At Northern Virginia Community College, where Jill Biden teaches three English and writing composition classes two days a week, she had to apply for a permanent position as an associate professor, said Jimmie McClellan, the dean of the school’s liberal arts division.

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“She’s very low key,” McClellan said. “She’s a good teacher who happens to be the second lady. Not a second lady who happens to be a teacher.”

Biden strives to look like a teacher and not a vice president’s wife. That means relaxing not only her own attire but also that of her entourage.

On her first day of school, the Secret Service agents trailing her looked “very formal,” McClellan recalled, so “she told them to tone it down” and start dressing like college students. On her second day, the agents wore “sweaters and Dockers,” McClellan said. Jill Biden told them to try again.

At work, she is diligent about keeping her office hours. But sometimes normalcy eludes even the Bidens.

During one session, Jill Biden asked the dean if she could leave 10 minutes early, cutting her office hours a little short.

Why? Air Force Two was waiting for her, she explained. McClellan recalled Biden leaving campus that day carrying a stack of ungraded papers. When she returned the next week, the papers were finished.

“Unlike other presidents and vice presidents, Joe Biden comes from a working-class background, and Jill Biden comes from a teaching background, and neither of those earned them independent wealth,” McClellan said.

Earlier this year, the satirical newspaper and website The Onion played off the vice president’s blue-collar roots and Photoshopped pictures of a shirtless and tattooed Biden washing a Trans-Am in the White House driveway.

Kate Palmer, the editorial manager of The Onion, said the story worked because it rang true. “There’s something kind of likable about him,” she said. “He’s the type of guy who would wash his car outside on the driveway.”

Or take in a 7 p.m. showing of “The Adjustment Bureau” — something the Bidens did in Washington this year. They also saw “Black Swan” and “An Education” in Washington, sharing the theater with other moviegoers.

This month, they hosted their second-annual party for reporters at the Naval Observatory. Joe Biden, who changed into shorts after his khakis got drenched, raced around the yard spraying reporters and their children with a water gun. Jill Biden, who sported a black wig and Army fatigues, also got in on the action, chasing guests with a Super Soaker.

Even though the security bubble “bothers him” from time to time, “he works really hard not to have it intrude on his life,” said Ted Kaufman, a longtime adviser and friend who was appointed to fill Biden’s Senate term in 2008. “He’s seen what the bubble can do to people … and how destructive it can be.”

Still, Kaufman added, “I think the Washington thing is working out very well.”

Adding to their normalcy: The Bidens’ son Hunter, his wife and three daughters live just over a mile from the Naval Observatory, and the Bidens spend their free time in Washington on the sidelines of granddaughter Maisy’s basketball games and at school events at Sidwell Friends.

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“Everything about us revolves around family,” Biden Owens said. When the family is together, “We don’t talk about politics. We talk about Maisy’s game or what [Biden’s daughter] Ashley is doing with her work.”

When Biden has free time, he works out in the Senate gym with his former colleagues. And last year, when one of his spokeswomen celebrated her birthday at Potenza, an Italian restaurant near the White House, the vice president dropped by to share his good wishes.

At the same time, Jill Biden is taking advantage of Washington eateries and destinations. She is frequently spotted dining out, including at Cafe Asia and Cork, and has popped in for at least one book reading at Politics and Prose. She watched the Alvin Ailey Dance Theater at the Kennedy Center, and when a friend visited a few weeks ago, she played tour guide at the National Portrait Gallery.

“They appreciate the fact that they can go to the Kennedy Center, … go to a state dinner at the White House,” Biden Owens said. “But their heads have never been turned by that.”

Jay Carney, the White House press secretary who previously served as the vice president’s communications director, said Biden “likes Washington” but has never let the town “inhabit him.”

As a senator, Biden “never went to embassy parties, never attended big dinners,” Kaufman agreed. “He’s not really ‘of Washington.’”

Kaufman recalled driving around Washington with the Bidens during the presidential transition when something caught Jill Biden’s attention. “‘That’s interesting. Where are we?’” Kaufman recalls her asking. Her husband didn’t know. They were in Judiciary Square — about a mile from Capitol Hill.

When the vice president rides Amtrak home, he sits with regular commuters — plus a Secret Service agent or two. Friends say he still returns to Delaware twice a month whenever possible.

There, the Bidens “insist on the lowest possible profile,” Carney said. “When he’s in Delaware, he’s just ‘Joe.’”

Patrons at Pete’s New Haven Style Apizza in Tenleytown began clapping when the vice president stopped in recently for pizza and gelato with Kaufman and Biden’s granddaughter, Naomi. But his neighbors in Delaware treat him like a typical resident of Greenville, a Wilmington suburb.

The second couple has requested no sirens for their motorcade, which stops at all traffic lights, aides said. They go to Mass at their old church, St. Joseph on the Brandywine. The vice president drops by Home Depot for items around the house — he planted most of the shrubbery in his yard — and he buys coffee from Janssen’s Market, a gourmet specialty store.

“They still have a real life in Delaware,” said Sen. Tom Carper (D-Del.), who served with Biden. “I think [Biden] revels in coming home.”


Eric D. Schwerin
Rosemont Seneca Partners, LLC
1010 Wisconsin Ave., NW
Suite 705
Washington, DC 20007
(202) 333-1880
eschwerin@rosemontseneca.com
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