If They Make These Tee Shirts…
October 20, 2008
Listen, I love Joe the Plumber just like everyone else who is currently engaged in the political discourse. I like him mostly because he is a lot like Kevin Costner in that terrible Swing Vote movie that no one saw, except that when the candidates who were trying to convince Kevin Costner that he should vote for them failed, they didn’t immediately go through his tax history, root out whether he happened to be licensed to do his job (in Ohio, he doesn’t need to be), whether he belonged to a union, whether he has illegitimate children, whether Sarah Palin and/or John McCain caused the breakup of his first marriage, or siced the mainstream media on the parts of his life that even he’d long forgotten. They embraced him and his awkward-yet-adorable child from a first marriage that he needed to impress to keep custody of as heroes.
Technically speaking, I think Joe represents what’s going on in the trenches; its something both parties don’t seem to quite get. Average, every day Americans are more tuned into the political process than ever before, and like the reality shows that they typically turn to, they want to know every detail including how it will affect them. Will Barack Obama have an obnoxious single that Sony pays to play constantly on Clear Channel stations? Will John McCain finally blow his lead in the last episode only to be chastized for his lack of ability to “make it work” by Tim Gunn? Will they both then end up cast off and under the direciton of Charm School headmistress Sharon Osborne? Hell, if any of these scenarios actually happened, by the way, I’d be much more enthusiastic about the November 5th outcome.
American people love reality, and now, reality has become more realistic. We want to see people like us doing things that famous people normally do, and we’ll identify better with famous people if they come from the same boring everyday backgrounds we do. The Internet has allowed typical Americans to become stars and we’re finally seeing some of us make it into the hardest entertainment industry of all to break: showbizness for ugly people…politics.
Sarah Palin makes her campaign bus stop at Wal-Mart for diapers and gets photographed carrying huge sacks of Taco Bell and McDonalds onto her campaign plane. Some dude who no one knew and might have done a crappy job rooting your toilet got up in Obama’s face and accused him of espousing socialist principles, challenged his tax policy and brought an entire nation into a brand new train of thought. We wanted to BE Joe the Plumber no matter who the douche-y politician we were haughtily questioning was. We wanted to be the dude who got the chance to tell some stuffed shirt how we felt about his carefully crafted script and his meaningless commitment to tax credits which would hurt just about everyone he claimed he was about to save.
America, we are reality television and suddenly our world collided with a presidential election.
And guess what? Its part of a marketing scheme! Apparently, Ed the Dairyman and Nancy the Teacher also want their voices heard.
Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin spoke to a crowd of about 10,000 supporters Sunday in a Roswell airplane hangar, not only making a reference to Joe the Plumber, but alluding several times to “Ed the Dairyman” after seeing someone in the crowd holding a sign identifying himself that way.
She warned voters about Democratic plans to raise taxes “on America’s hard-working families and our small businesses and a lot of folks just like Joe the Plumber and Ed the Dairyman out there.”
The only problems I see with this are: annoying YouTube videos where people say that they are So-and-So the What. Unless you’re a Dr. Seuss character or a Muppet, I don’t care to see it. And two, a sudden proliferation of stupid tee shirts that are relegated to the back of the short-sleeve tee shirt drawer alongside the Who Wants to Be a Millionaire one you ordered, wore once and discarded and the Don’t Tase Me Bro plastic bracelet. On the other hand, for something to go so viral that people market it on their own is like the Holy Grail of social media based marketing theory. Has the GOP unintentionally hit Dark Knight status?
Probably not, but if I see one of those tee shirts on someone, I’m taking a cell phone picture and posting that bad boy for ridicule.
Posted in Uncategorized
October 20th, 2008 at 8:17 am
The point that the McCain campaign does not seem to be making about the Obama tax plan is that his “tax cuts” don’t lower marginal tax rates for anyone. There’s just a boatload of tax credits if you have a kid in college, buy a hybrid vehicle, etc.:
http://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2008/10/wsj-obamas-tax.html
People who think that their take home pay is going to go up under the Obama plan are in for a rude surprise. The other tax issue he has to clear up is while McCain’s tax plan makes health insurance benefits taxable, he includes a $5,000 tax credit. For some reason, the Obama ads only mention the first part.
regards,
October 20th, 2008 at 3:14 pm
I’m John the I.T. Guy, and I support this message.
October 20th, 2008 at 4:42 pm
All they could come with on Joe is that his middle name is Joe and everyone calls him Joe, he makes about $40K but dreams of owning a business and making $250K, he owes a measly $1,000 worth of taxes, and his licensed plumber boss thinks so much of him that he’s been willing to put his license and livelihood on the line for him for 5 years. Joe also just went through some kind of custody thing for his son, which probably cost him a few bucks and kept him from paying his taxes on time. All of this sounds kind of normal in today’s world.
While Obama’s educated elite supporters are calling Joe uneducated and witless, he has Obama for lunch when he gets Obama to talk about spreading the wealth around.
It would do Palin some good to have a photo shoot with Joe the Plumber holding a spanner with her saying, “This is my guy”.
McCain needs to give his campaign some shock treatment by saying that he knows that Bush lied about WMD to get us into Iraq and he wants to get us out of there ASAP, among other things, and that he wants an independent investigation into 9/11.
October 21st, 2008 at 4:01 am
The independent investigation into 9/11 would certainly lock up the tin foil hat voting block. Hint: Al Qaeda did it.