Glenn Beck - He's just like us! (Except he's not)

Glenn Beck has worked hard to portray himself as a regular guy -- just an everyday Joe who fears for his country -- despite the fact that Beck, as my colleague Brian Frederick rightly pointed out, is hardly the everyman he likes to say he is.

The latest incarnation came during his keynote address at the CPAC conference (which itself is such an everyman thing to do), where Beck told the audience about how he grew up working in his father's bakery and became the first person in his family to go to college, and how he only went for one semester because he couldn't afford it:

BECK: My father, eventually, business, because of the 1970s and the small town was dying, we went out of business. He moved. But you know what? I learned from that. I learned from the mistakes. I learned from the failure.

I'm the first person to go to college in my family. I went for one semester. I took one class. Do you know why? I couldn't afford it. Now I never once even thought: "This isn't fair." I never once thought: "I want to take it from him, how come he gets to go and I can't go?" I never once thought I was owed an education. I was 30 when I went. I was trying to find answers.

When I couldn't afford to go anymore, I was okay. I went to work, I got -- I picked up my kids from school. I spent the afternoon with them. I put them down to bed, or whatever we did. I did my homework, if you will, for the next days show, and I went and I read. I educated myself. I went to the library -- the books are free. I went to the bookstore. I read until two, three o'clock in the morning some nights -- I still read until two, three o'clock some mornings -- after everything's done.

I educated myself. My education was free and I'm proud of that. When did it become something of shame or ridicule to be a self-made man in America?

Now, working to try and afford college while trying to support a family is a story being played out all over America. However, in Beck's case key details widen the gap between his everyman persona and reality. See Beck -- who has reportedly said, "I was making, I don't know, a quarter of a million dollars by the time I was 25" -- previously stated that the reason he was able to attend Yale (the everyman school) was due to a letter of recommendation from a sitting U.S. Senator. As he explained in his book, A Real America (a real everyman title)

I know Joe [Lieberman] very well. Well, we're not buddies or anything, not like we're out buying yarmulkes together. But Joe is responsible for my being accepted at Yale. He wrote a recommendation for me, and I attended Yale University. [A Real America, p111]

Of course, with details like that, his everyman act might start to feel as contrived as Beck's regular waterworks.