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5 July 2024

Michelle Obama: The Ultimate Joe Biden Replacement?

Jacob Heilbrunn

Hillary Clinton tried and failed. Now it’s up to another presidential spouse to try and crack the glass ceiling. A new Reuters/Ipsos poll suggests that only one Democratic candidate would decisively trounce former president Donald J. Trump in November—Michelle Obama.

Obama laps all of her potential competitors, including Kamala Harris, Gavin Newsom, and Gretchen Whitmer. 50 percent of voters said that they would vote for Obama while 39 percent indicated they prefer Trump. For Obama, who has viewed the Biden camp with suspicion and refused to campaign for it, claiming the nomination would represent a measure of revenge for its treatment of her friend Kathleen Buhle, the ex-wife of Hunter Biden. Barack Obama has attended fundraisers for Biden but never in the company of his wife who also shunned a state dinner for Kenya’s president William Ruto in May, the first for an African president in 16 years.

Democrats and a goodly number of independent voters clearly see Obama as a kind of Wonder Woman—a demi-goddess of wisdom and strength who could use a magic lasso the gerontocratic patriarchy surrounding Biden, reuniting the Democratic party. The Harvard historian Jill Lepore, in her book The Secret History of Wonder Woman, has argued that she forms a kind of missing link in the story of feminism over the past century. Perhaps a fresh Obama candidacy could play a similarly pivotal role for the current one, beleaguered as it is on a number of fronts, ranging from abortion to equal pay.

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