Comment Central: keeping your Joes straight

Paper plates of hotdogs or chocolate cake balanced on their laps, union members at the Plumbers and Steelfitters Hall to watch to Wednesday night’s presidential debate soon discovered that the candidates would spend much of the evening talking about a man much like them.

John McCain made more than 20 references to “Joe the Plumber” as a symbol of hard-working Americans — “angry” and “hurting right now” — who, he claimed, would be hit hard by his Democratic opponent’s plans to raise taxes on small businesses.

Mr Obama had to follow. He turned directly to face the camera, saying, “I’m happy to talk to you, Joe, if you’re out there", before offering reassurance about the tax proposals on which Joe Wurzelbacher — as the plumber is properly called — had confronted him during a campaign stop in Ohio over the weekend.

In the Plumbers Hall in Fort Wayne, the audience watched with deadpan expressions as they chewed through their TV dinner. These union members are inclined to vote Democrat, even if Mr Obama — a Harvard-educated, multi-ethnic, multinational hybrid — had not universally been first choice as the party’s nominee.

Some still showed symptoms of the disaffection that has blighted Democratic efforts in successive presidential contests to win back the white working class. Amy McComas, 40, a warehouse clerk, said: “It’s the same stuff over and over. Neither of them connect with my life. I’ll vote for Obama but there is so much involved, so many people, that it won’t matter and it won’t change much.”

Four years ago this section of the electorate backed President Bush by a margin of 23 per cent over John Kerry, not least because the prosperity from years of high growth has not trickled down to the rust-belt where free trade deals such as those signed by President Clinton are blamed for wiping out jobs. Many voters had become more motivated by social issues such as gun rights, abortion and gay marriage, apparently giving up on politicians ever improving their precarious livelihoods.

But in Indiana and other usually reliably Republican states, the Democrats are stirring as the financial chaos focuses attention back on the economy. Even Mr McCain, who has often sought to switch the fight to battlegrounds more suited to Republican “culture wars” - such as Mr Obama's alleged links with Bill Ayers, a Vietnam-era domestic terrorist - is now apparently fixated on the likes of Joe the Plumber.

The Republican nominee's problem is that his economic policies have, until very recently, resembled those of a White House Administration which is shouldering a large share of the blame for the market mayhem. A constant Democratic refrain is that Mr McCain merely offers “more of the same”. On Wednesday night he vented his frustration, saying: “Senator Obama, I am not President Bush. If you want to run against President Bush, you should have run four years ago. I want to take the country in a different direction.”

While voters may think they are all too familiar with what Mr McCain offers, their difficulty with Mr Obama is that he is famous without being known. There is still a sense of "otherness" surrounding him, partly explained by racism and false internet rumours that he is a Muslim or an Arab, but also by class - a significant element in the Democratic primary campaign when Hillary Clinton carried a swath of states running through the rust-belt and the Appalachian region.

Mr Obama's manner is more often redolent of his past as a constitutional law professor than that of his other early career as a Chicago community activist. Although he promises to provide universal health care and rebuild the manufacturing industry, his approach is cerebral, cautious and centrist. On Wednesday night he recoiled from Mr McCain accusation that he was preaching "class war", emphasising that his programme was more about tax cuts than spending increases.

Nor did he help himself much when, earlier this year, he linked the “bitter” outlook of working-class whites to their culture, saying it led them to “cling” to guns and religion.

“That was my biggest boneheaded move,” Mr Obama said in an interview with The New York Times. “How it was interpreted in the press was Obama talking to a bunch of wine-sipping San Francisco liberals with an anthropological view toward white working-class voters. And I was actually making the reverse point, clumsily, which is that these voters have a right to be frustrated because they’ve been ignored.”

His campaign has learnt its lesson. At the Plumbers Hall there are piles of leaflets declaring how “Barack Obama won’t take away your gun”, as well as others others emphasising his patriotism and Christianity — that he is “on our side”.

On Wednesday lunchtime Michelle Obama was in town to sell her husband as an American Everyman who knows all about the daily struggle. “Barack gets it because he has lived through it,” she said, describing how he was brought up as the son of a teenage single mother on food stamps, or how they spent years paying off college loans. “Don’t we want someone in the White House who knows what it’s like to carry a little debt?”

Plumbers fix toilets but Mr Obama may be faced with a bigger, stinkier mess if he makes it to the White House. Although he is, by his own admission, an "imperfect messenger", the Democrat appears to be cutting through all the clutter and connecting with voters. Outside the Obama headquarters in the city on Wednesday, Wayne Burris, 37, a heavy-set mechanic and lifelong hunter, was picking up a campaign sign. “I just made up my mind, I’m going to vote for him.”

In the last two elections he backed Mr Bush; in the Democratic primary he supported Mrs Clinton. “I needed to know more about Obama. But I’ve made my checks on him now. He grew up poor, he worked hard for what he got, he definitely ain’t a rich man.”

The making of an American legend

Before Wednesday night’s presidential debate, Joe the Plumber probably liked to think of himself as an Ordinary Joe, just your average Joe, a Joe Schmo, as he drank his morning Cup ’o Joe (coffee).

Last night, however, there were questions over whether Joe Wurzelbacher, now a household name after his cameo role in the debate, was a proper plumber, or just a cowboy. He admitted that he did not have a plumber’s licence, but insisted that he did not need one, because he was not self-employed.

Mr Wurzelbacher’s path to national fame began on Sunday when he was approached by Barack Obama as the Democratic candidate canvassed in Toledo, Ohio. Mr Obama tried to convince him of the merits of his tax plan, in which people earning more than $250,000 (£145,000) a year will pay more tax. Mr Wurzelbacher was unimpressed. Soon Joe the Plumber was being courted by the McCain campaign.

His extraordinarily outsized role in the presidential debate was a reminder of how the name Joe resonates in the American psyche. Joe Biden, has been telling voters in his role as Mr Obama’s running-mate how his Dad lost his job and how he was taught to “get up” after being knocked down.

Sarah Palin has been extolling the virtues of another well-known Joe, Joe Six Pack — in fact she has been claiming to be Joe Six Pack. She might want to think about heaping praise on Joe Lunch Pail as well, not to mention her son, who is serving in Iraq as a regular GI Joe.

Then there’s Shoeless Joe Jackson, the Chicago White Sox star caught up in the 1919 scandal when team members conspired to fix the outcome of baseball’s World Series. Legend has it that as he left court during the subsequent trial, a young boy begged him: “Say it ain’t so, Joe”— a line, incidentally, that Mrs Palin used in her debate with Mr Biden.

The burden of history and his 15-minute fame were proving too heavy for Joe the Unlicensed Plumber last night as he left home in a hurry, reporters in toe. They want to find out his name, for Mr Wurzelbacher is listed in the telephone directory as “Samuel”. And court documents show he owes nearly $1,200 in back taxes.

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