Dr. Jill Biden — wife of Vice President Joe Biden, known as America’s second lady — told Obama supporters in Colorado that important gains for education, veterans issues and women’s rights are on the line in the presidential election at stops on the Front Range this week.

Biden, who has continued teaching English at a Delaware community college, was introduced by her daughter Ashley and U.S. Rep. Ed Perlmutter at a Sunday night rally at a Lakewood campaign office filled with about 50 volunteers and staff. The next day she spoke at rallies in Colorado Springs and Ft. Collins.

“Like many educators, teaching isn’t just what I do, it’s who I am,” she said. “As a teacher, I’m involved in this election to make sure we continue to invest in quality education.” She said the administration has doubled funding for Pell Grants, revamped student lending to make it easier to apply and replay loans, and put a new emphasis on community colleges as a key element in the education system.

Noting that her son Delaware Attorney General Beau Biden was deployed to Iraq just a month before the 2008 election, she said that her one wish when Obama was elected was that he would end the Iraq War. “As a military mom,” she added, “I want to make sure that we take care of our veterans. It’s our sacred honor.”

“As a woman,” she said, “I’ve seen that Barack and Joe stand up for our rights and freedoms every day.” At a recent reception for breast cancer survivors, she was stunned by how many women approached her to say they’d been denied insurance coverage because of their preexisting condition.

“The president and the vice president of the United States know how important it is that women make their own decisions about their own bodies and their own health care.” It’s important to educate young women about the election, she said, “so that our daughters and granddaughters don’t have to go back and fight those battles that we fought so many decades ago.”

“Having Jill Biden in the position that she’s in, highlighted by the fact that she’s teaching full-time, is of so much value to those of us in the states are working toward the administration’s efforts to make our country competitive in the world,” said State Board of Education member Jane Goff at the Lakewood rally. “She’s been one of my heroes for a really long time, and everything she represents.”

—Ernest@coloradostatesman.com