After last night's debate, plumber Joe Wurzelbacher (pictured left on Fox News) has been thrust into the national spotlight -- whether he liked it or not. During the debate, John McCain kept going back to Joe the Plumber over and over and over again (23 times total). McCain could not leave the poor guy alone. Earlier this year, Joe met face to face with Barack Obama to discuss his tax plan with television cameras nearby. Joe objected to Obama's plan to increase taxes for people earning more than $250,000 a year, which he feared was "socialistic" (oddly, Joe earns considerably less than that per year). Thanks to McCain's repeated mentioning of Joe, the plumber's private life has suddenly been invaded by armies of reporters. Now we know everything there is to know about Joe: He is not a licensed plumber. He owes about $1,200 in back income taxes to the IRS. He was not expecting to be in the national spotlight. As he told Diane Sawyer on Good Morning America: "It floored me. It's not something I expected ever. My son is digging it. It's kind of neat." Actually, McCain probably should have called him "Handyman Joe," because that's what Joe does for a living, in Toledo, Ohio. And it turns out there is actually another Joe the Plumber. Joe Francis of Amarillo, Texas, owns the domain name to the website Joetheplumber.com.
Meantime, Obama's VP candidate, Joe Biden, was skeptical about this "Joe the Plumber business." As Biden put it on NBC's Today Show:
You notice John [McCain] continues to cling to the notion of this guy Joe the plumber. I don't have any Joe the plumbers in my neighborhood that make $250,000 a year that are worried. The Joe the plumbers in my neighborhood, the Joe the cops in my neighborhood, the Joe the grocery store owners in my neighborhood — they make, like 98 percent of the small businesses, less than $250,000 a year. And they’re going to do very well under us, and they’re going to be in real tough shape under John McCain.
Paging Joe the Plumber, paging Joe the Plumber! Somebody has got to unclog McCain's pipes!!!
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