R.I.P. Joe the Plumber.

"The one thing that's being tamped down here is, we're losing characters... The place needs character, and characters."

"When I got here, you had Jim Traficant, you had Barney, and then Dennis came..." says Rep. Steven C. LaTourette (R-Ohio), a nine-term veteran, reflecting on Kucinich's loss yesterday in a primary "in a newly drawn district against his once-close ally, Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D-Ohio)."

Well... does Joe the Plumber count as a character? Actually, he "almost lost his House bid to an obscure auctioneer named Steve Kraus — when the dust settled, Wurzelbacher escaped with a narrow 51 to 48 percent victory."

Sarah Palin and the teacher.

Here's your background reading. I just want to say that it's stupid as hell to say that someone working on the terrific musical "Hedwig and the Angry Inch" is "a singer in a transvestite band." What tastes like red meat to some people mostly makes you look small-minded, nasty, and uninformed. And going after Kathleen Gustafson on the ground that she's "not a teacher" when she works in some capacity in a school is like going after "Joe the Plumber" because he wasn't a licensed plumber. What you've got, in both cases, is an ordinary citizen who encountered a politician in a way that yielded some viral video. That revealed whatever it revealed about the politician. Trashing the private citizen is mean-spirited and likely to backfire.

"People don't understand the dictionary--it's called queer. Queer means strange and unusual. It's not like a slur..."

Joe the Plumber doesn't want gay people "anywhere near" his children.

"The domestic issues Mr. Obama ran and won on — health care, education, climate change, rebalancing the distribution of wealth..."

From a NYT article called "Obama’s Battle on Stimulus Shows Threats to His Agenda."

Obama ran on a redistribution of the wealth agenda? So, back when he was campaigning, and his opponents characterized things he said as meaning that he wanted to redistribute the wealth, and his supporters shouted that down as typical right-wing distortion, Obama was really laying the groundwork for claiming that he had won a mandate to redistribute the wealth? Incredible!

BUT: The redistribution will be $13 a week.

AND: David Weigel responds:

Err, yes. Sen. John McCain’s campaign spent the last three weeks of the presidential race accusing Obama of “socialist” tendencies because Obama told Sam Wurzelbacher that “if the economy’s good for folks from the bottom up, it’s gonna be good for everybody. I think when you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody.”

Obama didn’t really back down on this — he mocked it: “By the end of the week, he’ll be accusing me of being a secret communist because I shared my toys in kindergarten.” But he didn’t deny that he planned to cut taxes for middle- and lower-income Americans while raising taxes on the rich.

If Republicans didn’t want to give Obama a mandate for “spreading the wealth,” they probably shouldn’t have made that their message and then lost the election to him.

I think Obama's mockery was a denial of the accusation. If Obama had said, "I didn't just accidentally say 'spread the wealth around,' I really believe in the redistribution of the wealth, and I want you to vote for me because you do too," he would have lost.

"By making a 15-minute-of-fame political media celebrity its point man in Israel, PJTV took a risk and they've now been bitten by it."

"Joe is now the face of PJTV. His saying that reporters should not be with front line soldiers undercuts any effort by PJTV to put reporters on the front lines of a war."

J.D. Johannes is — rightly — taking this personally.

Via Instapundit – and I appreciate seeing the Pajamas Media bloggers deviate from promoting the project.

"I don’t think journalists should be anywhere allowed war."

"I mean, you guys report where our troops are at. You report what’s happening day to day. You make a big deal out of it. I think it’s asinine. You know, I liked back in World War I and World War II, when you’d go to the theater and you’d see your troops on, you know, the screen, and everyone would be real excited and happy for’em. Now everyone’s got an opinion and wants to downer – and down soldiers. You know, American soldiers or Israeli soldiers. I think media should be abolished from, uh, you know, reporting. You know, war is hell. And if you’re gonna sit there and say, 'Well look at this atrocity,' well you don’t know the whole story behind it half the time, so I think the media should have no business in it."

Joe the Plumber, in Israel, shaming the journalists.

I'm sure the reaction to this will range all the way from idiot to genius.

"Ann has her reasons, discernible in a parsing of her own comments following her post..."

I'm not sure if I like that or not. On the one hand, Sissy Willis, not bothering with my reasons, rolls along, lavishing praise on the project she has already bound herself to. ("Roger L. Simon is a genius.") On the other hand, it does encourage her readers to click over to this blog.

And those reasons of mine have to do with not wanting to be put in the position of needing to defend and promote a group project that I can't control.

Incidentally, the University of Wisconsin Law School is the greatest law school in the land!

Pajamas Media taps Joe the Plumber to serve as a war correspondent in Israel.

Many are the times when I've felt good about rejecting offers to work for Pajamas Media. This is one of them.

Joe the Plumber was "appalled" at John McCain but says "Sarah Palin is absolutely the real deal."

Politico reports:

Recalling a conversation he had with McCain about the $700 billion financial industry bailout in September, [Joe] Wurzelbacher said: “When I was on the bus with him, I asked him a lot of questions about the bailout because most Americans did not want that to happen.”

“I asked him some pretty direct questions,” he continued. “Some of the answers you guys are gonna receive — they appalled me, absolutely. I was angry. In fact, I wanted to get off the bus after I talked to him.”

Political stories I'd blog if I felt more like it.

1. Obama wants to bankrupt to bankrupt the coal industry (and the SF Chronicle sat on the audiotape).

2. Josh Marshall slurs Joe the Plumber as "Joe the Skinhead."

3. Jonah Goldberg pretend-looks back on the Obama presidency -- his "precipitous fall from would-be messiah, to near pariah."

4. "We’ve got to have a civilian national security force..."

5. Sarah Palin receives a (Canadian) prank call.

6. Old radical rag referred to community organizing and had a circular logo.

7. Fred Thompson speaks for John McCain, and John Kerry speaks for Barack Obama. Both do a nice job.

8. Another Senatorial candidate files a defamation lawsuit. The matter in dispute: godlessness.

9. Instapundit had more traffic in September than in October. Me too. Political fever peaks in September. By October, we're just trying to make it to the end.

10. And now, it's November, and this list hits the round number 10. The feeling is: Let it end!

A state employee says her supervisor had her run a child-support check on Joe the Plumber.

The woman, Vanessa Niekamp, says she acted under the impression that it was a routine check after an inquiry from Joe himself.

Attacking Joe the Plumber has been the stupidest move by Obama supporters. There was nothing to be gained, even if the man could have been personally destroyed. (Not that I recommend destroying private citizens for political gain.)

"The R.N.C. cleverly used the party committee's money to avoid the liability that would have occurred if campaigns funds were used."

Said campaign finance expert Kenneth Gross about that $150,ooo the Republican National Committee spent on clothes and accessories for Sarah Palin.

Had the purchases been made by the McCain campaign, it would be a conversion of campaign money into personal use, which is prohibited. The same rule does not apply to money from party committees.

Yes, diabolically devious of them -- wasn't it? -- to follow the law.

Yesterday, I cleverly drove 25 miles an hour in a 25 mph zone.

***

That's tucked down at the bottom of the NYT article by Patrick Healy and Michael Luo. Let's pick over the rest of it:

... Republicans expressed fear that weeks of tailoring Ms. Palin as an average “hockey mom” would fray amid revelations that the Republican Party outfitted her with expensive clothing from high-end stores.

"Tailoring" and "fray" ... a cute use of sewing and fabric metaphor.

Healy and Luo note that she needed the clothes and needed someone to accomplish the shopping for her, as she was suddenly thrown into constant campaigning in widely variable climates.

Yet Republicans expressed consternation publicly and privately...

Can you quote any?

[O]n “The View” ... Joy Behar, a co-host, noted the McCain campaign’s outreach to blue-collar workers — like an Ohio plumber who recently chided Senator Barack Obama over taxes — after another co-host, Elisabeth Hasselbeck, defended the expenditures....

Behar, not a Republican, but a Democrat and a comedian, surely had a comic opportunity and took it. More about her joke in a minute.

“It looks like nobody with a political antenna was working on this,” said Ed Rollins, a Republican political consultant who ran President Ronald Reagan’s re-election campaign in 1984. “It just undercuts Palin’s whole image as a hockey mom, a ‘one-of-us’ kind of candidate.”

Oh, yes, Ed Rollins, last seen advising Mike Huckabee and making the insightful comment: "To me, hitting somebody, knocking somebody down, is a great feeling. Firing out a negative ad just feels amazing... What I have to do is make sure that my anger with a guy like Romney, whose teeth I want to knock out, doesn't get in the way of my thought process." I'll bet he wasn't the first guy Healy and Luo phoned up to get an Republican mouthing the quote they wanted.

And that's the only on-the-record, negative Republican quote.

***

Now, back to that Joy Behar joke: "I don’t think Joe the Plumber wears Manolo Blahniks." Note how spectacularly Behar fails to get Joe the Plumber's way of thinking.

Joe was not yet successful, but had a dream of buying his own business, and he thought the incentive structure should remain place. He didn't want those making $250,000 to be subjected to confiscatory tax rates.

You may think that Joe the Plumber -- and the "I am Joe the Plumber" types -- are foolish not to express antipathy toward those who are economically successful, but they do not. As they put it they want to get rich too. They look at rich people -- or so they say -- and think -- not: that bastard doesn't know how I struggle -- but: I want to get there too.

In this light, Joe the Plumber wouldn't look at Palin's nice clothes and seethe with jealousy. He would think: I'm inspired to work harder so I can get some great clothes too.

***

Now, 2 things:

1. Palin was given the clothes. She didn't earn the money to buy them. So maybe she's not Joe's model of success. Joe doesn't want a handout. He wants to earn it and not have the government take it away. But Palin attained the level of success that made other people want (and, really, need) to give her these things, which is earning them.

2. Behar was also trying to be funny with the image of a man wearing fancy women's shoes, but Manolo Blahnik does make men's shoes:



Yes, slingbacks and open toes. Blue suede shoes. Deal with it. Need to go more conservative?



I can see Joe in those! The "What Not to Wear" guy, Clinton Kelly -- that repressive bastard -- says those shoes say "Hey look what I have on that you don't have the balls to wear." I say: have the balls.

ADDED: This newer "I Am Joe the Plumber" makes the point even better than the one I linked to, above:

"Al the Shoesalesman Gets a Tax Cut."

Nicely done ad and website with easy to use calculator -- not that I believed the number I was given.

ADDED: This post is red meat lobster for my other readers.

AND: I just rewatched. In the end, Al says, sarcastically, "This is gonna be tough," then: "Obama!" I feel sorry for an older, family man who only makes $20,000 -- and I know this Al is the fictional TV-show character -- but really, is it okay to think of elections in terms of a personal deal for each voter, so that it's obvious that you vote for the candidate who offers you the most money? Quite aside from whether we believe we'll get what we are promised, isn't there something fundamentally wrong with thinking in such self-centered terms? Notice, too, that this idea is out of keeping with the statement Obama made to Joe the Plumber, that Joe ought not just to think of himself but to see the value of benefiting everyone.

Did Sarah Palin really call Obama "Barack the Wealth Spender"?

Is CNN reporting it wrong or is it the case that Palin cannot be trusted with phrase-turning? It should be "Barack the Wealth Spreader."

ADDED: Well, my commenters are giving me a hard time. How dare I criticize Sarah Palin for a non-error! My point -- as the second link showed -- was that since she had the format "Barack the [blank]," she should have had the reference to what Obama said to Joe the Plumber, that he wanted to "spread the wealth around." It's valid to peg him as a big spender -- though "wealth spender" is an awkward expression -- but it's more damaging and resonant to scare us about wealth redistribution.

Sarah Palin on "Saturday Night Live."

How do you think they'll handle it? I like this prediction, from Zachary Paul Sire, in the comments in The Riverside Tavern post:

Palin will be Palin, and various cast members will be dressed up like her, trying to impersonate her, auditioning so to speak. She'll be judging them in some fashion. None of them will be good. But then Tina Fey will come out and there will be some sort of split screen, face to face moment between the two of then, standing in awe of each other.

Then again, I don't know.

They aren't going to do anything political because a) they don't want to make her look bad, and b) they don't want to make her look good, either. It will be politically neutral and more about the surreal imitation that Fey does it. A sort of cinema verite moment.

But maybe by the time you get here, the show will have already aired, in which case, what did you think of it?

UPDATE: That was mildly amusing. Alec Baldwin got to stand next to Palin and insult her -- by accident, thinking she was Tina -- and then got to say something that's true: Sarah Palin is more attractive than Tina Fey. Did Fey deserve that? No. Palin seemed like a seasoned actor, which is nice... but disturbing. If our politicians are great actors, we have a big problem. [ADDED ON REWATCH: Did Baldwin say Palin is more attractive than Fey? He mistook Palin for Fey, then, corrected, told Palin she was more attractive in person. I think that means he believed Palin was less attractive than Fey, but now, seeing Palin in person, he acknowledges Palin's equivalent attractiveness. Or something. The disrespect to Fey that I thought was there is, technically, not.]

MORNING UPDATE: Palin reappeared in the "Weekend Update" section of the show, which I can see in the comments, many of you watched in real time. I had to turn the show off after a minute of the opening monologue. Really, I was interested in seeing Palin again, but I can't sit through that stuff. TiVo in the morning worked just fine. Palin was a good sport, sit-down dancing and smiling, while Amy Poehler did a hilarious rap routine. Poehler is heavily pregnant, but she doesn't let that slow her down at all, which is rather Palinesque. I laughed out loud when the Todd character came out and at the line "All the plumbers in the house, pull your pants up."

(By chance, I'd just turned on live TV to see Joe the Plumber on "Fox and Friends" and they razzed him in person about the one thing everyone thinks is funny about plumbers. As they put it: "Why don't plumbers wear belts?" Joe went on at some length on the topic -- defensive! The life of a plumber is tough. It's not easy, as some people seem to think.)

ADDED: The opening:



The rap:

Joe the Plumber...

In the new McCain ad:



In the new Red State Update (NSFW):



ADDED: What's with this bizarre snobbery from Marc Ambinder:

(... Joe The Plumber's name isn't Joe, and he's not officially a plumber. Discuss.)

Actually, he's "Sam The Guy Who Does Plumbing," technicallly.

His voter registration application misspells his name, btw. ("Worzelbacher.")

And, btw, you misspelled "technically," technically. I mean, what the hell? Many people go by their middle name. Mitt Romney's full name is Willard Mitt Romney, for example. It's not deceitful. And guys who do plumbing are plumbers. So he's not a licensed plumber? Isn't that like being an accountant but not a certified public accountant? Wasn't this man in his own front yard when Obama came up and talked to him and responded to a question by promoting the redistribution of wealth? Who gives a damn how pure Joe the Plumber is, anyway? He just by chance provided the occasion for Obama to say something that deserves attention.

"John McCain threw the kitchen sink - and 'Joe the Plumber,' too - at Barack Obama during Wednesday night's final, in-your-face presidential debate."

Writes The Daily News.

"It was Mr. McCain’s last chance to cast doubt on his opponent’s character and credentials, and he threw the kitchen sink at him — along with the plumber," writes Alessandra Stanley at the NYT.

Seems like everybody saw that joke and went for it. Except maybe Newsweek's Andrew Romano, who kind of just tripped over it in the dark:

The Kitchen Sink Debate

That loud clanging you heard coming from Hofstra University tonight? It was the sound of a kitchen sink soaring from stage right, where Republican nominee Sen. John McCain was seated, and landing stage left. Depending on where you sit and who you support, the unwieldy washbasin either knocked Sen. Barack Obama off his perch or shattered in pieces on the floor....

The answer was immediately apparent to anyone with a pulse. Over the course of 90 minutes--and I apologize if my count is not complete; my fingers can only type so fast--McCain accused Obama of being a) a craven wealth-spreader (at least eight times), b) an abject tax-raiser, especially on folks unfortunate enough to make $42,000 a year, c) a lily-livered coward who's never once stood up to Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi, d) a town-hall avoider, e) a public-financing flip-flopper, f) the most avid negative advertiser in American history, g) a befriender of "washed-up terrorist(s)," h) an enabler of "one of the greatest frauds in voter history" (which just so happens to be "destroying the fabric of American democracy"), i) an "eloquent" dissembler, j) a support of infanticide and, finally, k) a guy who wants to do all kinds of unspeakable things to someone named Joe the Plumber, up to and including raising his taxes, redistributing his money and fining him for choosing the wrong kind of health care. (No word yet on whether Obama plans to spit in Joe's beer when he's looking in the other direction.) After all that, McCain's claim that his "campaign is about getting this economy back on track, about creating jobs, about a brighter future for America" seemed like a punchline.

Hey, Newsweek, make the punchline. Get Joe the Plumber working on that kitchen sink!

... And I kind of liked the Joe the Plumber concept--even if the senator spoiled it by saying "Joe the Plumber" 21 times and unleashing lines like this one: "You were going to put him in a higher tax bracket which was going to increase his taxes, which was going to cause him not to be able to employ people, which Joe was trying to realize the American dream." Who knew McCain's talking points were written in Swedish then fed through Google Translator.

D'oh. Wrong punchline.