Joe the Plumber – my kind of guy

Even better, he’s put my birthplace on the map for something good.

Cartoon by William Warren, hat tip to ALG News - Americans for Limited Government.

Yes, Joe Wurzelbacher (now much more famous as “Joe the Plumber” – can an endorsement deal be far behind?) lives in Holland, Ohio, a suburb directly west of Toledo and the next town easterly on the Conrail tracks from the one I spent my teenage years in, the rural area of Swanton, Ohio. (My early years were spent in south Toledo, most of that time I went to the former Heatherdowns School.) I probably went close by his house a few times working on the schools in and around Holland for my first architectural employer.

So Joe has made a name for himself and the city he calls home. But in truth, all he really did was make a statement and ask a question, just like thousands of bloggers have. His just happened to make it to national television, and Barack Obama finally told the truth about his agenda when he famously expressed the desire to “spread the wealth.”

While he may only be a plumber by avocation and not official title, Joe has that same common sense as millions of other Americans do, millions who are skeptical of politicians making pie-in-the-sky promises that only seem to have one effect: make government larger and make it take more from your pocket (as the cartoon suggests.)

With Barack Obama caught on tape revealing his true agenda, it was time for the media and other Obama allies to employ the only tactic they seem to know when confronted with this sort of crisis – kill the messenger. Suddenly we found out that Joe wasn’t a licensed plumber, is behind on his property taxes, and isn’t even a Joe – his given name is Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher. Also dug up was the fact that Joe is related (by marriage) to Charles Keating, he of the Keating Five scandal nearly 20 years ago (h/t on that to Bob McCarty.)

But when given an opportunity to say his piece, Joe showed that he’s a lot like many other Americans who toil in obscurity – even Joe called himself a “flash in the pan” and seems uncomfortable still with his fifteen minutes of fame. I wanted to make mention of a few statements attributed to him that I heard Thursday on Rush – being a 24/7 member I could track down the transcript and thus I have. Here’s some of what Joe said, thoughts that are on the minds of more Americans than the mainstream media would like to admit:

I want (my son) to live in an America that he’s proud of.  I’m tired of people downing America, saying that we’re this bad country.  I mean, that upsets me and my friends greatly.  You know, we are the greatest country in the world.  Stop apologizing for it! I mean, really. It just… (sigh) I get real mad about that.  I’m not sorry for being an American, I’m not sorry for having the things I have.  I’m not sorry for any of those things.  I’m not sorry that we’re in Iraq.  Has it kept us safe?  Absolutely! I believe in that 100%.  WMDs or not, I don’t care. You know, we took the fight to them. We’ve done a pretty good job there.  Could we have done better?  Yeah, sure.  But, you know, it’s easy to be an armchair quarterback. You know, and hindsight they say is 20/20.  I call it X-ray vision.

Exactly. Apparenly Joe believes in capitalism and in his country right or wrong, I guess the elites would classify that as drinking the Bush Kool-Aid. Nor does he suffer from class envy:

Well, to be honest with you, I mean (the idea of redistributing wealth) infuriates me.  I like, you know, Bill Gates, I don’t care who you are. If you worked for it, if it was your idea and you implemented it, it’s not right for someone to decide you made too much, you’ve done too good and now we’re going to tie some of it back.  That’s just completely wrong.

Joe also commits the cardinal sin of supporting our troops as well as their mission:

You know, my friends in the military that come back and tell me the thanks that they receive for us being there, it doesn’t get enough play.  I mean we’ve liberated another country.  I mean, you know, freedom, things that every one of you guys take for granted, everything that Americans take for granted, I mean these guys haven’t had it; now they got it?  I mean that’s an incredible thing.  You know, our guys here that are poverty stricken have cell phones.  Those old people over there, you know, they have one pair of pants and a shirt.  You know, so what we’ve done over there is an incredible, incredible thing.

When the elites and liberals think of what our military has done overseas, they think of Abu Gharib and the prison at Guantanamo, not of the humanitarian accomplishments. Joe is just echoing the sentiments of those of us who truly are the majority of Americans; a man who got the opportunity to break the silence of the silent majority.

Being from Toledo and spending most of my first forty years there, there is a part of Joe which is representative of the people there and part which is not.

Toledo is a gritty, rust bucket city that’s caught in a transition not entirely of its own making. For the most part it’s a blue-collar city which means Joe fits in perfectly as a guy who’s not afraid to get his hands dirty and can do the physical work that’s sometimes demanded of his profession. There’s thousands who do similar sorts of tasks, whether it’s on the assembly line at the Jeep plant or what I still call the Hydramatic plant (I think it’s under a different name now but they assemble the transmissions for GM products), work for the major contractors in town, or toil at one of the dozens of factories large and small that supply the auto industry.

On the other hand, many of those workers differ from Joe because they believe in much of what the union and local media tell them, particularly when it comes to the salaries of CEO’s against the salary they make on the line at Jeep or driving the stone out of the local quarries. Loyal to Democrats beyond a fault, they elect the same old people to political office and wonder why nothing changes for the better – Marcy Kaptur has been Toledo’s Congresswoman since 1982 and, except for a one-term Republican she replaced, her and “Lud” Ashley, another Democrat, have been the only representatives of the Ninth District since the mid-1950’s. The City Council in Toledo has generally been a 10-2 or 11-1 Democrat majority from the time the city adopted a split district/at-large system in the early nineties. If Big Labor says they should support the Obama agenda, Toledo and Lucas County will likely vote at a better than 2-1 ratio for Obama.

But the city is not all bad, and there’s a lot of good people I left behind when I decided to move here. Included among them was a guy I don’t think I ever met but has been the beneficiary of fifteen minutes of fame simply for asking a question and getting a truthful answer. So here’s to you, Joe, and thanks for reminding me that I’m not the only person hailing from the “Glass City” who only asks for Americans the opportunity to pursue a dream.

Late addition: Adam Bitely at NetRight Nation shares a similar sentiment.

Author: Michael

It's me from my laptop computer.