The man who would be king
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Interesting profile of Joey B, excerpted from an article by Kyle Smith, National Review
Another weird detail is that Biden referred to Neilia as “my beautiful millionaire wife.” Biden brings up money repeatedly: Kelley alludes to “the temptation to sell out to big business or big labor for financial help” because Biden admitted “that more than once he was tempted to compromise to get campaign money.” Biden added, “I probably would have if it hadn’t been for the ramrod character of my Scotch Presbyterian wife.” He had been in office for only eight months before he started complaining about being underpaid. “I don’t know about the rest of you but I am worth a lot more than my salary of $42,500 a year in this body. It seems to me that we should flat out tell the American people we are worth our salt,” he said on the Senate floor. ($42,500 is about $249,000 in today’s dollars. Biden was 31 when he made these remarks.) Biden’s evident belief that he deserves to be wealthy stood out in a 2008 New York Times story that explained how a man living on a public servant’s salary was able to live like a Bourbon king: “Biden has been able to dip into his campaign treasury to spend thousands of dollars on home landscaping,” the Times explained, and also rich businessmen filtered their support of Biden through other means: “the acquisition of his waterfront property a decade ago involved wealthy businessmen and campaign supporters, some of them bankers with an interest in legislation before the Senate, who bought his old house for top dollar, sold him four acres at cost and lent him $500,000 to build his new home.” He sold the house he had bought in 1975 for top dollar to — get this — the vice-chairman of MBNA, who gave Biden $1.2 million for it. MBNA has showed its gratitude to Biden’s support in a number of ways: by giving over $200,000 to his various campaigns, by hiring Hunter Biden, by flying Biden and his wife to a retreat in Maine, etc. Mother Jones dubbed Biden “the senator from MBNA.”
In the 1974 interview, Biden also apparently brought up unprompted his ultimate goal: “I know I can be a good President.” Neilia, he said, would have been an asset with respect to this: “I know I could have easily made the White House with Neilia.” One of his associates told Kelley of any future wife: “He also needs to find a First Lady, a woman who enjoys politics and will help him get to the White House.” His then-girlfriend, a reporter named Francie Bernard, was considered appropriate: “I do know that the woman he marries will he as rich and as pretty as she is,” the Biden associate told Kelley. What a strange place to bring up money.
