Say It Ain't So, Joe
"Just when you didn't think things could get worse for John McCain - they go in the toilet. Literally."
-- Robert J. Elisberg:
Everybody's talking about Joe the Plumber, the guy John McCain used in the Presidential debate as an example of someone who would be hurt by Barack Obama's tax plans. What John McCain didn't tell us is that "Joe" does not make $250,000 (which means he would probably be helped by Obama's tax plans, not hurt), he just "hopes" someday to be rich enough to afford to buy a million-dollar business and in the meantime doesn't want to "hurt" others who are rich already. McCain also didn't tell us that neither Joe nor his employer are licensed as required by the county the business operates in and reportedly Joe has tax liens against him. McCain conveniently forgot that Joe is is related to Charles Keating (yes, the 1980s savings-and-loan scandal figure McCain was messed up with). Finally, McCain didn't tell us that Joe is a Republican himself who supports McCain for President and thinks Barack Obama is a "socialist". Joe told the morning talk shows today that Barack Obama "tap dances better than Sammy Davis Jr." Ouch!
OK, Joe the Plumber is a great character, if you don't dig too deep. John McCain made an inspired decision to use him in the debate. This will forever be remembered as the Joe the Plumber debate. But I think McCain overplayed his hand. He mentioned Joe the Plumber about six times too many. By the end of the debate, I half expected to see Joe the Plumber distractedly wandering around the back of the stage like McCain himself did in the town hall debate.
Where's the local angle to this story? Rodger Jones, on The Dallas Morning News Opinion blog, was quick to break the story that "Joe the Plumber has a Website already." Uh, Rodger... joelaratheplumber.com is for a different Joe, a plumber in California, not McCain's unlicensed plumber from Ohio. And what's with that "already?" Why do you think the Web site wasn't in existence *before* the debate? And how did the more obvious domain name, joetheplumber.com, escape your research? Only that's not the right Joe either, but at least he's from Texas. Amarillo, in fact. I hope his Web server is holding up under the increased traffic today.
2 comments:
I think some of this is debunked.
He isn't related to Keating. He apparently has been into right wing talk shows in that areas including calling in.
Olbermann had some of the story on him so check it out.
Thanks for the correction. It appears now that Joe the Plumber is *not* related to Charles Keating.
There was another biographical fact that also had to be retracted. An early report said Joe the Plumber wasn't even registered to vote. It turns out (unless this later report also turns out to be false) that the voter registration database used a different variation of his name than reporters were looking for. No big deal, right? Such cross-checking is no big deal for one person, but when it's hundreds of thousands of people, like all the recently registered voters in Ohio, it results in massive voter suppression. Manual effort to correct all the typos and match up the Samuel J. Wurzelbacher in, say, the Ohio driver registration database with the Joe Wurzelbacher who registered to vote, and do this 200,000 times before election day, just isn't going to get done right. Denying voting rights to everyone whose names don't match up exactly is a case of voter suppression, which is exactly what the Republican Party is engaged in in Ohio.
Post a Comment