Basically, Joe is the car dealer’s son, the cocky but friendly high school football star (wide receiver) with the cool car.

An interesting thing about Biden is that he’s had enough work done that later in life he got back to some the golden boy good looks he had in high school.

But in-between he had lost his looks in the late 1960s when the culture switched to long hair just when he was losing his.

Biden: “My dad didn’t have a lot of money, but he ran the largest Chevrolet dealership in the state.”

Biden’s class background is complicated, but not unique.

It’s pretty similar to my best friend’s, who grew up middle class and only discovered later that his salesman father had been chauffeured to grade school in a limousine during the 1920s.

Biden’s father likewise grew up rich, but went off and on through ups and downs:

Father’s Tough Life an Inspiration for Biden
By John M. Broder
Oct. 23, 2008

Joe Sr. had it all in his 20s, sailing yachts off the New England coast, riding to the hounds, driving fast cars, flying airplanes. A decade later, he found himself with a wife and four children living in a two-bedroom apartment in a dreary, treeless suburb of Wilmington, selling used cars.

His children saw hints of his former life in his wardrobe he was always impeccably dressed with a perfect pocket square and in the back of his closet, where he kept his riding pinks, his polished boots and his polo mallet.

But eventually Joe Sr. got really good at selling cars and could afford to buy his blue-eyed boy nice things like this 1967 wedding gift, a Corvette with its 435 horsepower 427 cubic inch (7.0 liter) engine.

But Joe Jr. went through enough constrained family budgets as a child that his self-image as middle class has never much changed.

So Trump and Biden are basically salesmen from that part of the 1960s before The Sixties arrived in the late 1960s, with Trump pretending to be more high class than he is and Biden pretending to be not quite as high class.