Late last month, Beck’s Fox News program featured a beautifully produced segment, complete with haunting strains of piano music that drew heavily on a 2005 profile of Jones written by Eliza Strickland for the East Bay Express, an alternative city weekly. When you watch the Beck segment, you get the overwhelming impression that Jones is a gifted public performer, one who may well have been wasted in an obscure White House role. The segment is full of wild and strangely entertaining exaggerations, and it all but accuses Jones of being a secret Maoist radical. The truth, as Strickland reports, is rather more prosaic. Like Beck, Jones is a raconteur with a penchant for dramatizing things to comic effect. His early flirtation with extreme left-wing politics suggests the mild insecurity of a geeky youth who wanted to be taken seriously by his tougher, more formidable peers. Jones is in no sense a thug; even in his radical phase, he was at best “an internet thug,” the kind who’d never hurt a fly but who talked a big game. Given his extraordinary intellect, Jones shrewdly decided that macho bluster about fighting The System was far less constructive than using his wit and charm to become part of and ultimately to reform The System. One can imagine an authentic Maoist radical condemning Jones as a sellout. It’s easy to see how this might pose a problem for Jones; he seems to value the opinion of the most militant and thus most authentic voices, yet he sees their path as a dead end. And so he tries to win over all comers, from matronly white Republican Meg Whitman, who found him persuasively pro-business, as well as kids in the Oakland neighborhoods he’s left behind, who want him to stay true to his roots. In the age of saturation news coverage, it’s very hard for public personalities to carefully tailor their self-presentation to different audiences, which the rest of us do constantly. It’s unfair. But unfortunately it’s a fact of life.