He wasn't a plumber and his name wasn't Joe – but he became famous for 15 minutes during the 2008 presidential elections after John McCain decided to latch on to him during the Republican campaign's death-spiral.
Still not comfortable with his inevitable fate as a future Trivial Pursuit question, Joe – real name Sam Wurzelbacher – still pops up at fringe political events. And this weekend it finally dawned upon him what presidential campaigns are all about – and what his precise role in 2008 was.
Scott Detrow, a reporter for Pennsylvania Public Radio, heard Wurzelbacher speaking at a Republican gubernatorial candidate's gig in Pennsylvania, in which he laid into Palin and McCain, calling McCain a "career politician" and lambasting Palin for supporting McCain's Arizona senate primary race (where McCain is struggling to see off a red-meat Republican challenger).
Detrow asked Wurzelbacher why he was biting McCain's hand, after it was McCain who shone the national spotlight on him by repeated references in a presidential candidates' debate. "I don't owe him shit. He really screwed my life up, is how I look at it," Wurzelbacher told Detrow. "McCain was trying to use me. I happened to be the face of middle Americans. It was a ploy."
President Obama, on the otherhand, got more respect from the artist formerly known as Joe the Plumber: "I think his ideology is un-American, but he's one of the more honest politicians. At least he told us what he wanted to do." And Wurzelbacher also had common-sense views on the crazies who dispute Obama's nationality and compare him to Hitler. "The birthers, the truthers — if people are trying to bunch them [with tea partiers], that would kill us. That just pushes away Democrats and independents who might come out for our cause otherwise."
