Joe Biden's Well-Crafted Fake Persona

Looks like the real Joe isn't Mr. Nice Guy after all.

There’s an old saying, attributed to George Burns, about success. “The key to success is sincerity,” Burns said, “If you can fake that, you’ve got it made.”

Which brings us to President Biden, who ran in 2020 as someone very different from Donald Trump. But at least with Trump we knew what we were getting — a narcissist, a braggart, and a fundamentally dishonest man. With Biden we thought we were getting a nice guy. He was someone who portrayed himself as middle-class Joe from Scranton, PA. He was the collegial guy who was friends with Amtrak conductors. He was, we were supposed to believe, an American “everyman.”    

Except it all looks like a well-crafted act, a fake persona invented by a lifelong politician who has taken George Burns funny line about faking sincerity — not as a joke — but as a strategy to win voters who in 2020 were looking for the kind of guy Joe Biden was playing.