Comparing Jill Biden to Lady Macbeth is an Insult to Lady Macbeth

Recently Alexandra Pelosi, the daughter of former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, referred to former First Lady Jill Biden as “Lady McBiden” and suggested she “put on [her] big girl pants, play the long game and think about [her] husband’s legacy.”1

Dr. Jill Biden strikes me as a woman who has been behaving like an eight-year-old for a long time. Expecting loyalty when the political landscape and empirical reality say otherwise. Not accepting when you’ve lost. Displacing your bitterness onto everyone around you, including your anonymous loyal supporters who just wanted a viable presidential candidate. She certainly doesn’t understand competition and sportsmanship, as I wrote about earlier this year.

And the comparison of Dr. Biden to Lady Macbeth, apologies to Alexandra Pelosi and other journalists, is an insult to Lady Macbeth. Women today are not under the same legal and financial constraints as they were in Shakespeare’s England or in his mythical ninth-century Scotland. Women may not have reached the Oval Office officially – we have seen shadow governments – but one became Speaker of the House without riding the coattails of her husband. Lady Macbeth, on the other hand, needed marriage for both her ambitions and financial support.

Yet Dr. Biden feels betrayed over Nancy Pelosi’s decision to quietly, but firmly, tell her longtime friend, Joe Biden, that he was no longer a viable presidential candidate after his disastrous June 2024 debate performance.

Why betrayed? Because Nancy Pelosi decided to look beyond personal alliances to serve a greater political loyalty?

Nancy Pelosi is a highly talented politician, and she knows what is required. Unlike Dr. Biden, Pelosi didn’t rise to power through marital alliance, but rather through her own political acumen.

Dr. Biden should ask herself if Pelosi points the finger at others for problems that she needs to solve herself.

Rather than owning up to the Faustian bargain that she made when she relied on her husband to access the political sphere, it sounds like Dr. Biden expects other women to pretend that they are powerless. Perhaps, like quite a few American women, she labels them “stuck up” if they don’t.

“Big girl pants,” indeed!