You can tell a lot about a man once you learn what he fears most, and with Franklin Foer's recent expose of White House doings, Joe Biden's biggest insecurity seems to be his fear of "being perceived as stupid."

 According to the Daily Caller:

Franklin Foer, the author of a new tell-all book about Joe Biden, appeared on NBC’s Meet the Press and said he believes the president has insecurities over “being perceived as stupid” because of the plagiarism scandal that derailed his first presidential campaign.

He said this on Meet The Press.

“Yeah. I think one of the things that’s so interesting about Joe Biden is that he has these insecurities that govern a lot of the ways in which he moves through the world. And so, one of his primary insecurities is that he doesn’t want to be perceived as stupid because he had this plagiarism scandal back in the 1980s. So when he walks into an interview or walks into a press conference, he wants to have mastery of what he’s discussing. So his prep sessions can go on for long periods of time,” Foer said.

WATCH: Biden has “insecurities” about being “perceived as stupid,” says @FranklinFoer, who wrote a book about the president’s first term.

“He has this plagiarism scandal back in the 1980s. So when he walks into an interview ... he wants to have mastery of what he’s discussing pic.twitter.com/6oEXXE7vbm

— Meet the Press (@MeetThePress) September 3, 2023

Amazingly, those prep sessions do about as much good as Kamala Harris's "homework" sessions, which is to say, no good at all.

Stupid? You decide. 

Stupidity is the most obvious thing about him, starting from the day he got "elected."  We all know it wasn't his brains he got elected on. Just ask one of those truck drivers moving ballots from state to state for counting.

Beyond that, his dealings with Hunter Biden and his other family members, a long-festering corruption splaying from China to Ukraine to various domestic matters, is rather famous for its stupidity as well as its corruption: It's always getting leaked out. Most mafia-type crooks know how to hide their corruption better than Joe Biden does. Biden lets it all hang, or rather, dribble, out, even as he belatedly tries to cover it up. From abandoned laptops and diaries, to the proliferation of whistleblowers and angry business partners, to easily detected pseudonym correspondence, to cunning oligarchs with tape recorders, to troves of stashed classifed documents, he's always scrambling, which pretty well tells us that Biden's not too intelligent even at self-preserving corruption. Hunter Biden, recall, is 'the smartest guy I know," and if that's Joe's standard for smartness, it's little wonder Biden is on the south side of stupid.

But he's stupid in more ways than just self-interest. 

There's no Bill Clinton-like ability to pivot with the political winds in him, even as his poll numbers go down. Clinton had enough sense of political self-preservation to take a centrist road whenever he could see that the public was turning against him. Following a disastrous midterm election where he lost both houses of Congress, he changed course -- on welfare, social issues, and other matters, remodeling himself into a fascismile of a "moderate."

Joe Biden has no such instincts. 

His entire presidency has been a long list of stupidities, all of which he could correct by moderating, yet he doesn't.

Teachers' unions shut down schools for one example, and he still can't distance himself from them; he actually continues to take his marching orders from them, no matter what it does to his poll numbers.

His shutdown of federal drilling and cancellation of the Keystone XL pipeline were part of his green agenda, and even as those acts predictably wreak havoc on the economy, he can't change course. He's also similarly locked in the transgender agenda, unable to project even a moderate stance on the matter; he just barrels ahead, like a bus with no brakes. His foreign policy is similarly situated -- apparently he thought the Arabs, Vlad Putin, and Venezuela would gladly pump oil for him as he shut American drilling down, unable to anticipate how they would really respond, which was that they laughed up their sleeves at him. He stands there watching the poll numbers of his rival, President Trump, go up every time he sends the goons in to charge him with another crime -- and he can't change course. The military he commands is falling apart due to his radical wokester policies (and at times, even trying to moderate itself), but Joe can't change course. The border is wide open with some eight million illegal crossings, enough to drag down his poll numbers -- and once again he can't change course. He focuses on "optics" instead of common sense leadership, even with his own political legacy on the line.

It does seem to go to his wayback that he's always the Fredo, never the Sonny, never the Michael, in his perception of his miserable self.

Barack Obama, who never had Biden's insecurities about being perceived as stupid, originally mocked Joe so badly in the first part of his term that biden had to beg Obama to call him "vice president" instead of the figure of fun he had been called, and insisted that others do likewise. Later on, before Biden ran for the presidency, he was discouraged by Obama from running ("you don't have to do this, Joe,") and when Biden finally ran for the presidency, he was unable to secure Obama's endorsement until after the primaries. 

Obviously. Obama knew something about this guy; he "perceived" something," which had to bother Joe.

Foer cites Biden's earlier history of caught plagiarisms as affecting him badly. We could also add that he's tried to compensate for it in some areas through smears and viciousness -- as seen in his early smears against Clarence Thomas during his days as a Supreme Court nominee.

It's telling that he's most concerned about "being perceived" as stupid, more so than actually being stupid. A good man who acted stupidly and knew it would try to correct that stupidity. Not so with Joe, whose only concern is whether people think he's stupid, not the stupidity itself, let alone correcting it. It's always those dogging "optics," not the actual performance.

And that's his biggest problem. 

It leads him to project his insecurities about himself on the public, viewing the public as stupid, and thus, gaslighting harder instead of just changing course -- so pay no attention to all that inflation in the economy, that disastrous Afghanistan pullout, that open border, those peeling-away allies, or those high gas prices. He's hard at work at that right now, viewing the public as very, very stupid indeed as he touts the economy.

He's a sensitive soul, so he doesn't want to be "perceived" as stupid. Apparently, his record never figures into this.

It all reveals a certain creepiness, which is often seen from him in many ways.

Eric Hoffer once observed:

Naivete in grownups is often charming; but when coupled with vanity it is indistinguishable from stupidity.

Maybe that's where his idiocy comes from -- a certain naivete, coupled with abundant vanity. 

Whatever it is, it tells us where his weak spots are, and what Republicans should exploit in the 2024 election. Goodness knows, America's enemies already have.

Image: Screen shot from a camera aimed at a television set during a live broadcast, processed with Adobe CameraRaw filtering.