Joementum
Kevin Drum on the final days of McCainism:
But the genuinely weird part of it is McCain’s bizarre embrace of Joe. It’s one thing to use the guy as a campaign prop, but to tell the world that it was Joe who “turned the whole thing around”? That Joe is his personal “role model”? You gotta be kidding. Those aren’t things you’d want to admit even if they were true, are they?
It’s fascinating to me how McCain, who spent so much of 1999-2005 at loggerheads with elements of the conservative base, keeps forgetting the distinction between things that make the base excited and things that help his campaign. Sarah Palin is the obvious example, but Joe is in some ways a deeper and truer example. The idea behind the Joe the Plumber saga is that Barack Obama would be bad for people like Joe, a small business owner who is (putatively) prosperous enough to be hit by Obama’s tax hikes on people with over $250,000 in annual income. Of course Joe doesn’t actually earn that much. But if he had, Joe would just be the very model of a hard-core Republican. Whites are more Republican than non-whites. Men are more Republican than women. Small business owners are more Republican than any other occupational group. High-income people are more Republican than are middle-class and poor people. And among white people, those with no college degree are more Republican than those with college degrees.
Thus, a white male small-business owner practicing a blue collar trade and earning enough money to be hit by Obama’s tax hikes is nothing other than the Platonic Ideal of a Republican (think Tom DeLay when he owned a successful bug-killing business). Republican crowds go wild for Joe because they can identify with him. But by the same token, the people who identify with Joe are the Republican base. They can’t turn this thing around. And they’re certainly not the people you’re supposed to be talking to in October. It’d be as if Barack Obama were criss-crossing the country with a young, hip lesbian acting as his main surrogate to attack McCain’s health care plan.
57 Responses to “Joementum”
Register
RSSLogin
Topic Cloud
ArchivesBlog RollAbout Matt YglesiasContact Me
Donate
November 4th, 2008 at 8:38 am
What does it say about our political dialogue that “Joe the Plumber” (a) isn’t named Joe, (b) isn’t a plumber, and (c) doesn’t make nearly as much as he said he does? And people still take him seriously?
November 4th, 2008 at 8:41 am
Who takes Joe the Skinhead — oops — Plumber — seriously? The same Republican cultists who have been electrified by Sarah Palin – everyone else, I think, feels condescended to by the whole “Tito the Builder,” “Joe the Plumber,” “Charlie the Choo-choo Man” Republican narrative.
November 4th, 2008 at 8:42 am
“It’d be as if Barack Obama were criss-crossing the country with a young, hip lesbian acting as his main surrogate to attack McCain’s health care plan.”
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Well, I imagine at least in spirit Rachel Maddow was there with Obama every step of the way.
November 4th, 2008 at 8:47 am
@steve duncan: Folks!
You beat me to the humor punch, but I was going to go with “Worst Sitcom Idea Ever” myself.
November 4th, 2008 at 8:51 am
You make a good point, MY. If Obama had said anything as absurd at “role model,” it would have been harped on 24/7 and the election would have totally turned.
November 4th, 2008 at 8:58 am
I agree with Matt about many, many things, but this makes no sense.
Hip lesbians are less than 1% of the population. White men are about 35%. And many white men with educations (like Chris Matthews or Bill O’Reilly or Shawn Hannity or Jeff Foxworthy) identify with white workingmen like Sam/Joe.
Oh, and unlike lesbians, whites without college degree are a key swing group. Though the GOP has made inroads in this demo since Nixon, they routinely send guys like John Murtha to Congress.
November 4th, 2008 at 8:59 am
If this thing had gone on for another two weeks, the Republicans would have figured out the obvious: a joint tour by Joe the Plumber and Sarah Palin, bonding as we know they can, and finally perhaps having a little too much fun together. Then the rumours, the splash in the grocery-checkout rags, the denials. Todd and Sarah would stand by each other to the delight of the fundamentalist base, while countless bubbas would believe Joe had scored with the woman who had winked at half (ok, 40%) of America, thereby confirming their flagging belief that you can achieve anything in this great country of ours. A positive for turnout on all side. Might have been worth, oh, 0.1% of the popular vote.
November 4th, 2008 at 9:05 am
If the Republicans lose today, they’re in for very serious problems. They live in an alternative universe and simply have NO sense of how people think.
They stay in their NRO, and racist corners and say Hussein, Bill Ayres and Rev. Wright till they’re in a frenzy, and then they convince themselves it’s really an issue. Joe the Plumber is the latest in a long string of wild misses not just by McCain but the Republicans. They just don’t do reality anymore.
The irony of the election has always been that the mere presence of Obama is a repudiation of everything they tried to hang on him. You just look at him and you clearly don0t see Rev. Wright. He’s no Bill Ayers. The socialist thing is a joke. You look at Obama and you just see how much Palin doesn’t cut it.
November 4th, 2008 at 9:11 am
Obama/Maddow ‘12!
November 4th, 2008 at 9:35 am
The other thing he shares with the GOP base is that Joe is batshit crazy. In one of his very first televised interviews, he talked about immigration being one of his main concerns. He asked why we’re not harsher on illegals, why all we do is give them a bus ticket home.
It was pretty clear to most people that the guy’s something of a winger. And yet Team McCain ran with it. And so we got this nonsense about how a vote for Obama meant death to Israel, Obama doesn’t love his country, yadda yadda wingnut.
I suspect McCain’s embrace of this loon has more to do with McCain wanting to hold onto something, anything, in the waning days of his campaign. It didn’t matter if Joe the Plumber didn’t make a lick of sense, as a person or strategically. McCain just wanted a story to tell that was favorable to his side, in the hopes that if he told it enough times it would become the truth.
November 4th, 2008 at 9:42 am
Of course, Joe the Wurzelbacher is not, you know, actually a small business owner. As I understand it, he’s talked about buying the biz for 6 years, without taking any steps to actually do it. So in some sense, he’s perfect representation for that other important part of the base, Cheeto-eating, basement dwelling “freedom fighters.”
November 4th, 2008 at 9:42 am
Sean “Shawn” Hannity is a college drop-out.
November 4th, 2008 at 9:46 am
McCain & courage don’t mesh! McCain & recklessness does! That’s why he was shot down. I don’t condemn him for giving more than his name,and rank to the North Vietnamese, agreeing to portray himself as a ‘black pirate’ or some such thing or even trying to commit suicide twice. Under those circumstances who knows what someone is capable of? The FACT is, none of that represents a display of courage!! Obama, on the other hand, is one courageous dude to be putting himself in the face of possible assassination every single day for the past two years and, quite likely, for the next eight!!
November 4th, 2008 at 9:51 am
It’s worse than that. Joe the Plumber is not “image neutral,” a campaign surrogate who energizes the GOP base without at the same time scaring away swing voters and independents. Joe may indeed feed into that sense of blue collar, populist cultural resentment the GOP has used to such good effect for the past 30 years. But he also walks and talks like a bigoted, ignorant skin-head. And the classic conservative “me first” attitude comes through loud and clear in Joe’s swaggering arrogance since McCain plucked him from obscurity to give him this fleeting cult hero status. I will bet that Joe the Plumber loses McCain at least one vote for every one he gains.
November 4th, 2008 at 9:56 am
Joe is hardly your typical “ordinary American worker.” How many of those are going to run for Congress in two years or have media agents and a record deal?
http://sunstateactivist.org/ssablog/
November 4th, 2008 at 9:58 am
“It’d be as if Barack Obama were criss-crossing the country with a young, hip lesbian acting as his main surrogate to attack McCain’s health care plan.”
Except, unlike Joe, the young, hip lesbian would be correct to attack McCain’s health care plan. How about if she were attacking him on ethanol?
November 4th, 2008 at 10:10 am
Hip lesbians are less than 1% of the population. White men are about 35%. And many white men with educations (like Chris Matthews or Bill O’Reilly or Shawn Hannity or Jeff Foxworthy) identify with white workingmen like Sam/Joe.
The swing vote thing might be a valid point, but I don’t know about this. White men may be about 35 percent of the population, but white male small business owners with no college degree? It still might be more than hip young lesbians* but it’s a lot less than 35 percent. And we can count on partisan nuts like O’Reilly or Hannity to identify with a gay Jewish black dude if he’s Republican, but everyone else will mix and match. Who does a college-educated Latino male who works in a medium-sized business have more in common with?
* Let’s see here, assume 10 percent of the population is homosexual, assume half those are female, assume 90 percent of young lesbians are hip and assume “young” means between 18 and 35, let me get out an actuarial chart…
November 4th, 2008 at 10:11 am
The Joe the plumber story line is pretty bizzare. First the guy is not likable. I would say the median McCain supporter is more likable than Joe the plumber. Second, he’s insufficiently disciplined to be a big figure in a campaign. He has a lot of crazy views and is not shy about articulating them. Third, he seems racist. I am not going to call him racist, I don’t know enough about him. He is fair skinned with a shaved head, has compared Obama to Sammy Davis junior. He also looks a lot like the police brutality crooked cop from the shield. Fourth, he’s thuggish and dumb and dishonest.
I don’t think the idea of elevating human interest stories up to serve as examples of how abstract policies effect people is a bad idea. But if you are going to do that why would you pick someone who sucks more than average? Dave the fisherman seems really nice in a way that Joe the plumber doesn’t. And he doesn’t just seem nice because he’s voting for Obama. He just seems nice, because some people seem nice.
November 4th, 2008 at 10:13 am
Joe [sic] the Plummer [sic] seems to me to be a perfectly crafted Democratic plant – a far-right angry white male with a shaved head who makes frequent tap-dancing and Sammy Davis Jr. jokes and speaks frequently of the disloyalty of brown people.
He is literally the second best thing going for Democrats these days. He is the face of the future of the Republican Party. The more this guy’s seething face and shaved head are on TV, the better. The more commercials that feature him as the face of rich white protestant business-owning Republican male victimhood, the better.
Really, the incompetence of the McCain campaign is staggering.
Steve Schmidt: “John, what we need to do is find somebody that represents a broad, centrist, maverick Republicanism, and I think that person should be a somewhat unstable skinhead.”
McCain: “Brilliant!”
November 4th, 2008 at 10:14 am
The McCain campaign gave up on independents once it doubled down on Palin. They’ve pretty obviously decided that the only way they can win this thing now is if self-identified conservatives turn out en masse, petrified of a black commie terrorist. So they might as well push that angle as hard as they can.
November 4th, 2008 at 10:20 am
When “Joe” was called out by Shephard Smith for an outright smear of Obama’s position on Israel, it should have indicated to any campaign with an ounce of integrity that “Joe” should have be excised like a malignant tumor.
Not John McCain, however, who continued to hug him as tightly has he hugged Bush. John McCain…Country Last.
November 4th, 2008 at 10:23 am
No, that is a gay jewish young blogger from a ivy league school making not much money living in a urban area with black political leadership as a prop for Obama’s health care plan.
November 4th, 2008 at 10:29 am
AWC writes: I agree with Matt about many, many things, but this makes no sense.
Hip lesbians are less than 1% of the population. White men are about 35%. [...]
I think this is missing the point. Matt didn’t say that “Joe the Plumber” was unrepresentative because of being a white male — if you look at it at that level, the hypothetical “Jo the Young Hip Lesbian” is even more representative, as white women outnumber white men.
November 4th, 2008 at 10:32 am
I think you’re wrong here. Joe The Plumber, the man, not the issue he represents, makes sense as a campaign ploy. Even if he owns a small business and he’s (putatively) a lot wealthier than most people, he’s still got that blue-collar name and occupation and shaved head. People much less successful than he is can relate to the guy. It isn’t like Obama running around with a young, hip lesbian at all; there are still a lot of homophobes in this country and not many plumberphobes. The problem is that, as nice of a mascot and symbol he makes, you’re just not going to win an election on the issue of raising taxes for those who make over a quarter million a year. People identify with the guy but not that much.
November 4th, 2008 at 10:36 am
Joe the Plumber, meet John the Loser, LOL!
Aiala
November 4th, 2008 at 10:49 am
I don’t even really see evidence that ‘conservative crowds’ are ‘going crazy’ for “Joe the Con-man”. I’ve never seen any figure or statistic of any group at all who had a high or favorable opinion of either Joe (Sam) himself or the whole gimmick as a campaign tactic. McCain just picked it up and ran with it, assuming it would take off. It never did. McCain and Palin and all of their surrogates keep talking about him, expecting it to have some magical effect. In reality, it simply comes off as pathetic, cartoonish. Makes McCain seem even older and more confused to be mumbling randomly about a “plumber” who isn’t a plumber who claims to make more than 6 times per year what he actually makes. Even the dumbest of Republicans can tell you that this guy is silly.
I do hope the Repubs keep holding onto these kinda things though. Please, by all means, adopt Joe the Con-man as a mascott, and run him with Palin in 2012. Guarantee our chances now! There could be no better ancillary effect of this election than for Palin to take over party leadership among a bunch of warring factions. She can consolidate their feelings of hatred and resentment, and lead them to the most sound, resounding defeat of all time next election. That would really give a lot of us out here something to look foward to.
November 4th, 2008 at 10:50 am
He was Joe the Caricature.
Here’s the point: if you look at McCain’s ads and rallies and speeches, they really weren’t engaged with ‘regular folks’, regardless of how much of a prop you think they were. The Obama infomercial, with its four families? It pretty much drove home that McCain had spent a lot of time talking about himself, but there was a real disconnect from everyday shit. In spite of the ‘Country First’ tag, it was a very self-centred campaign, and that possibly explains why their adopted Everyman didn’t ring true.
JtP was indicative of a certain type of Republican ressentiment — the guy who earns $40k and thinks he’ll somehow be a millionaire next year doing the same kind of work as long as the govt. doesn’t pick his pocket for Other People; the guy who thinks Hannity is Just Like Him.
November 4th, 2008 at 11:02 am
But by the same token, the people who identify with Joe are the Republican base. They can’t turn this thing around. And they’re certainly not the people you’re supposed to be talking to in October.
I think McCain is taking direction from Homer Simpson: “I’m a white male, age 18 to 49. Everyone listens to me, no matter how dumb my suggestions are.”
November 4th, 2008 at 11:06 am
Joe the Plumber is all about resentment: white resentment, white working class resentment, white rural resentment, and white hard-right consservative resentment. Those categories overlap a lot, but they are not exactly the same.
Joe the Plumber is a shadow of Sarah Palin – a little harsher, directly male and thereby confirming McCain’s maleness as a buddy (as opposed to Palin’s indirect confirmation of McCain’s maleness by her overt female sexuality), and more fictitious than Palin (who is fictitious enough).
The fictiousness of Joe the P helps to make him an everyman.
His effect in the election will likely be a wash between those energized to vote for McCain and those further energized to vote against him.
But watch out for what happens after the election. The politics of raging resentment have been let loose from the bottle. It will not be easy to stuff them back in. McCain will be powerless to do so. If he tries to calm those folks down, then they will turn and blame him for losing because of his weakness.
Today is a day for voting and then, I so dearly hope, celebrating the most incredible election the country has seen since, oh, maybe 1800, or maybe ever.
Tomorrow there are going to be problems. All the problems we know about from GWB, plus the rage that will burn after McCain’s defeat.
November 4th, 2008 at 11:15 am
And their Everyman is a man, when they’re losing women, and a white guy, when they’re losing the black and Latino vote. Message: We don’t care about you, just those rich white guys. How Mavericky!
November 4th, 2008 at 11:20 am
===
Definitely. I’d bet Joe Wurzelbacher really likes it when people say, “you remind me of Vic Mackey in The Shield.” You know that’s what he’s going for.
November 4th, 2008 at 12:01 pm
The absurdity of the whole Joe the Plumber narrative has been seriously underplayed. As Matt says, the McCain campaign goes out and tries to find the “Platonic Ideal” of a McCain voter, in preparation for a debate mind you, and they can’t even pull that off. It’s now quite clear that Joe the Plumber would be better off financially under Obama. Sadly this point got lost in the whole “spread the wealth” controversy.
Meanwhile, how long would it have taken Obama to find a person of family that illustrates the merit of his policies? Not very long (and if fact they seem to have successfully provided several for that infomerical thingy). And would McCain be able to meet with these people, look them in the eye, and explain why his policies are actually better for them. No f-ing way.
Obviously it’s easy to write the whole Joe the Plumber strategy as a silly campaign ploy that didn’t play out quite as McCain planned, but it’s shortcomings really do illustrate the larger problems with McCain’s presidential bid.
November 4th, 2008 at 12:07 pm
McCain, Schmidt, and Davis underestimated the country’s ability to accurately judge Palin’s and Wurzelbacher’s actual credentials. They thought they could play us for fools, again. The stupidity of the McCain camp can not end soon enough. I’m sick of being insulted by the radical right.
November 4th, 2008 at 12:23 pm
Joe the Plumber is not going to turn an election that is so favorable to the democrats. And he is a thin reed to base a campaign on. But the argument above is still wrong.
Joe the Plumber is precisely who the republicans need in order to win elections like this (or at least the stripped down version of him minus his odd views on Israel and social security).
The Republicans cannot win on people who actually benefit from Republican tax proposals. To win they need a large number of people who see themselves as benefitting from Republican tax proposals even though they actually don’t.
People who make $40,000 a year but think of themselves as people who make (or should make) $250,000 a year are a larger demographic than the people who actually make $250,000.
November 4th, 2008 at 1:07 pm
Ever since September and the Palin pick, McCain’s high command has been campaigning as if their chief fear was that the GOP base would completely splinter in this election, consigning their candidate to McGovern or Mondale status.
I don’t know if that’s because they really saw the race in those terms — i.e. they weren’t playing to win, but to keep from getting completely blown out — or if they were just mindlessly following the Rovian equation of GOP base + X% = 50.01%.
In the end, with Joe the Plumber’s help, they managed to hold the base together — but all that means is that McCain gets to be the Mike Dukakis of this election, instead of the Walter Mondale.
November 4th, 2008 at 1:30 pm
Perfect description of Sarah Palin. Didn’t stop McCain there either.
Palin-Plumber ‘12! Only in my wildest Dem dreams.
November 4th, 2008 at 3:40 pm
Republicans have become a caricature of kitch americana.
November 4th, 2008 at 3:49 pm
Wait, don’t you mean two hip young lesbians? (wink wink)
On a more serious note, your overall post makes a lot of sense, but the hip young lesbian analogy is completely off the mark.
November 4th, 2008 at 4:40 pm
Joe the plumber is a good representative of the Republican base — simply not living in reality. Here is a guy that does not own a business, doesn’t even have a plumber’s license and makes $40k per year but has the fantasy that he will own his boss’s business and make over $250k. Give me a break. He is an example of the fantasy idiocy that has ruined our country — people who think they “should” have something, and therefore they do, in their minds. It astounded me that McCain kept running with this guy — it seemed like a real loser strategy.
November 5th, 2008 at 3:59 pm
I think a lot of people reacted to Joe the Plumber’s claims of wealth by thinking to themselves, “I am paying way too much for plumbing. I should just go to Home Depot and do it myself.”
November 10th, 2008 at 10:49 pm
But now you are visiting Euwowgold.com, we have own farmers, and we are not middleman, we
can
give you the gold as soon as possible, face to face or mail, choose you like.
Reliable
We farm the by manual, no bots, no cheats, no hacks. We have the 24*7*365 Online
Support. You
can contact us anytime via Live Chat, E-mail, IM and Telephone.
http://www.powerleveling2000.com
November 15th, 2008 at 2:40 am
Welcome to http://www.powerleveling2000.com . We are a world class wow gold store online. We supply
cheap wow
gold to our loyal l2 power leveling and
reliable customers. you can buy really cheapwow gold here. We have mass
available stock of gold wow on most of the servers, so that we can do a really instant way of wow
gold
delivery. We can deliver your gold wow on the order in a short while. We have been an ebay power
seller and paypal confirmed sellerbuy WOW Gold
of wow gold for years.So it is securest and safest to buy wow
November 19th, 2008 at 4:08 am
mmo wow gold powerleveling
Head to Booty Bay to get in on wow gold the fun! You’ll be transformed into a zombie and can – at your choice – rush back http://www.powerleveling2000.com/WowGold.aspx to the city to be healed … or spread your foul infection where you will! Just don’t come near us with your plagued hands. Other WoW Insider Zombie Invasion resources
world of Warcraft Horde Leveling Guide-Welcome the Wow gold War Club
November 19th, 2008 at 4:09 am
mmo wow gold powerleveling
Head to Booty Bay to get in on wow gold the fun! You’ll be transformed into a zombie and can – at your choice – rush back http://www.powerleveling2000.com/WowGold.aspx to the city to be healed … or spread your foul infection where you will! Just don’t come near us with your plagued hands. Other WoW Insider Zombie Invasion resources
world of Warcraft Horde Leveling Guide-Welcome the Wow gold War Club
December 8th, 2008 at 4:38 pm
Caption: Christopher Plummer and wife Save the Children’s 75th Anniversary Celebration at Lincoln Center – Arrivals New York City, USA …. Veteran actor CHRISTOPHER PLUMMER was riddled with guilt on the set of
January 17th, 2009 at 10:16 am
laptop battery
laptop batteries
February 5th, 2009 at 12:46 am
That’s right! buy wow gold and cheapest wow gold .
February 8th, 2009 at 10:29 pm
laptop battery
March 1st, 2009 at 5:10 am
viagra
It is the coolest site,keep so!
March 1st, 2009 at 5:52 pm
cialis
I want to say – thank you for this!
March 14th, 2009 at 5:04 am
Great site. Good info
xanax
March 22nd, 2009 at 5:58 am
tramadol
Excellent site. It was pleasant to me.
April 2nd, 2009 at 5:02 am
Excellent site. It was pleasant to me.
buy cheap viagra
April 9th, 2009 at 5:03 am
thanks !! very helpful post! viagra
April 19th, 2009 at 7:18 pm
For eight years,cheap wow gold it wasworld of warcraft gold my honor buy wow goldto servebuy wow gold as Presidentdofus kamas. The first kamas dofusdecade of Final Fantasy XI gilthe new centuryffxi gil was a time lotr goldofflyff penya consequence – a timebuy flyff goldapart. Tonight,
Maple Story MesoswithMaple Story mesoa grateful heartEverQuest 2 gold, I have
eq2 platone Runescape goldlast opportunity Runescape moneyto see Runescape Moneysome thoughtsRunescape Power leveling about Runescape Goldthe tripffxi gil, which dofus kamaswe havekamas dofus traveled togetherdofus kamas, anddofus kamas the futurekamas dofus of dofus kamasour nationkamas dofus.
April 19th, 2009 at 7:22 pm
Fortunatelyhair straighteners, his long GHDlost daughter chi hair straightenerssaw replica handbagsthe appealwholesale handbags and replica designer handbagsthe pair replica watchwere reunitedswiss replica watches. The strange replica rolex watcheswas that puma shoeshis daughter nike shoeswas right womens clothesbehind him ed hardy clothingwhen the paperreplica handbags has thereplica watches photograph – the Designer replica handbagsphoto aboveCoach Handbags. What are Gucci Handbagsthe chancesRolex Watches of that!
April 19th, 2009 at 7:23 pm
Teacher wow gold pricessays that wow gold hacksSanta is wow gold guidesnot realwow gold game class.A teacher has make wow golda class ofwow gold shop 25 pupils wow europe goldin tears wow fishingwhen she wow gold tradetold them wow gold makingSanta Clauswow gold online does not wow hacksexist.The supplypaladin wow teachers gold in wowout of: “It is your parental very cheap wow goldleave presents wow gold sellerat Chrsitmas Day, when young people excited, since they are buy gold for wowtalking Christmaswow gold exchange.The class of seven-year-olds at Blackshaw Lane Primary School, Royton, near Oldham, Greater Manchester selling wow goldbroke into tears buy cheap wow goldand told her parents when they are at home.The parents then complained about the incident and were inaletter from the school buy guild wars goldsay the teacher wassell wow gold disciplined over the derailment.A father said: “My son came home and said that substitute teacher had the class that Santa does not exist, and it is yourcheapest wow gold mom and dad that the gifts for them.