Last updated on August 11th, 2014 at 12:00 am
“You may have noticed — there was a lot of talk about Senator Obama’s tax increases and Joe the Plumber. Last weekend, Senator Obama showed up in Joe’s driveway to ask for his vote, and Joe asked Senator Obama a tough question. I’m glad he did; I think Senator Obama could use a few more tough questions.
The response from Senator Obama and his campaign yesterday was to attack Joe. People are digging through his personal life and he has TV crews camped out in front of his house. He didn’t ask for Senator Obama to come to his house. He wasn’t recruited or prompted by our campaign. He just asked a question. And Americans ought to be able to ask Senator Obama tough questions without being smeared and targeted with political attacks,” McCain said.
Poor Joe the Plumber, all he did was put himself in the spotlight by holding a press conference yesterday. By opening himself up for questioning, he invited the media to look into his story and background. What the media found out is that Joe isn’t a licensed plumber. He has no real plan to buy a business. The business that he was eyeing up doesn’t make $250,000, so his taxes would not go up under the Obama plan. We also found out why Joe hates taxes. It is because he hasn’t paid his, and there is a lean against his house.
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Most of this information came from a story that the AP put out yesterday. The Obama campaign has not said a word about Joe the Plumber, which means that John McCain was basically lying in order to defend a lie. The McCain campaign latched on to Joe the Plumber to show the dangers of Obama’s tax plan, and McCain connecting with the middle class, but the result has been the exposure of another ill conceived, poorly thought out McCain campaign gimmick.
I have no sympathy for Joe. He put himself out there in front of the media. He apparently wanted his 15 minutes of fame. Maybe he didn’t think that anyone would bother to check on his story, but when a person gets injected into a presidential campaign, then takes the ball and runs with it, the media is going to do some looking around. McCain is wrong. The Obama campaign did not smear Joe the Plumber. This whole weird saga is just another example of the facts getting in the way of the story that the McCain campaign is trying to sell.
Jason is the managing editor. He is also a White House Press Pool and a Congressional correspondent for PoliticusUSA. Jason has a Bachelor’s Degree in Political Science. His graduate work focused on public policy, with a specialization in social reform movements.
Awards and Professional Memberships
Member of the Society of Professional Journalists and The American Political Science Association