Joe the plumber is real hero of the debate
Written by Writer on Sunday, October 19th, 2008
Joe the plumber is real hero of the debate
Anne Barrowclough
By Times Online
October 16, 2008
They clashed on the economy and scored points off each other on negative campaigning.
But in the end, the real star of the third and final presidential debate was neither John McCain nor Barack Obama but a small town plumber called Joe.
Joe Wurzelbacher from Toledo, Ohio, has become an unlikely media star after finding himself the focus of the debate between the two White House rivals.
He is a tradesman who has worked 12-hour shifts for years and now plans to buy his own small plumbing business. The trouble for Joe the plumber is that this would take his earnings to more than $250,000 - making him a target of Obama’s plan to tax the wealthy.
Joe pointed this out to Senator Obama as the Democratic candidate campaigned in Toledo last weekend.
At the time he had no idea that the brief conversation between plumber and Presidential candidate would go around the world, after it became the centre piece of John McCain’s attacks on his rival’s economic policies.
First Mr McCain reminded Barack Obama that Joe the plumber did not want to vote for him because his taxes would rise under the Democrat. Then both candidates repeatedly spoke directly to Mr Wurzelbacher, turning him into a real life version of “Joe Six Pack,” the ordinary guy chasing the American dream, as they faced off in their third and final debate.
“Joe wants to buy the business that he’s been in for all these years,” Mr McCain said, using Mr Obama’s encounter with the plumber to attack his rival over a tax plan he maintains would shackle small businesses.
“Joe wants to buy the business that he’s been in for all these years.
“Worked 10, 12 hours a day. And he wanted to buy the business, but he looked at your tax plan and he saw that he was going to pay much higher taxes.”
Mr Obama responded with his own version of his chat with Joe.
“What I essentially said to him was, five years ago, when you were in the position to buy your business, you needed a tax cut then.
“And what I want to do is to make sure that the plumber, the nurse, the firefighter, the teacher, the young entrepreneur who doesn’t yet have money, I want to give them a tax break now.”
During the encounter in Ohio, Mr Wurzelbacher had asked the Democrat:”Your new tax plan is going tax me more, isn’t it?”
The Illinois senator answered: “It’s not that I want to punish your success; I just want to make sure that everybody who is behind you that they’ve got a chance to success, too. I think when you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody.”
Two days later, invited on to Fox News to discuss the conversation, the plumber said:”His answer actually scared me even more.
“Robin Hood stole from greedy rich people and redistributed it to the peasants, so to speak, so if he’s calling us peasants, I kind of resent that,” he said.
“He said he wants to distribute wealth. And I mean, I’m not trying to make statements here, but, I mean, that’s kind of a socialist viewpoint. You know, I work for that. You know, it’s my discretion who I want to give my money to, it’s not the government decide that I make a little too much and so I need to share it with other people. I just — that’s not the American Dream.
He added that the American Dream for him was “you work hard. You’re going to get what you want eventually.”
After the debate, Mr Wurzelbacher told familysecuritymatters.com that he hadn’t been too impressed with either candidate. He repeated his complaints against Senator Obama, saying: “So he does want to punish me, he does want to punish me for working harder to - you know, my big thing is the American Dream,” he said.
But he also refused to endorse Mr McCain: “There’s a lot of things I wish McCain would say,” he said. “As far as this, yes, I would like him to speak. Not so much about small businesses, but just people in general that make this money,” he said.
“I guess I would like him to speak about that and a bunch of other things.”
Asked which candidate would get his vote on November 4, he refused to say.
“That’s for me and a button to know,” he said.
