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Color me baffled. In response to a question about Sarah Palin’s qualification to be president, John McCain talked first about her credentials as a reformer and then moved swiftly to explain that Palin “understands special-needs families. She understands that autism is on the rise, that we've got to find out what's causing it, and we've got to reach out to these families and help them, and give them the help they need as they raise these very special-needs children. She understands that better than almost any American that I know. I'm proud of her.” Later on, he added—again regarding autism—that “Sarah Palin knows about that better than most.” Now, we know Palin has a special-needs child: Her infant son, Trig, has Down Syndrome. So it’s fair to suggest that she understands special-needs families and that—even though it’s not clear what she’s ever done or even proposed doing for them—she might one day be an advocate for them. But I can’t figure out why McCain was coupling Palin with autism, rather than Down Syndrome. Yes, his comment started as a testimonial to her concern for those with special needs, but it came off sounding like he just didn’t know that autism and Down Syndrome are very different. A quick Web search reveals that the main connection between Palin and autism appears to be that, like McCain, parents of autistic kids are blogging hopefully that she will have some special sensitivity to their situation. (Also, it seems Palin has an autistic nephew.)
As panders go, I am finding this autism gambit baffling. Did McCain just get confused about the fact that Trig has Down Syndrome? Or was he trying for some kind of broad-brush special-needs appeal, only to end up awkwardly implying that all special-needs families are the same? So much so that you can swap out diagnoses and nobody will notice? That same broad brush was slapping around later when, in discussing abortion, he started sneering about the trickiness of allowing exceptions for the mother's health. No nuance here. Just the bold implication that all health exceptions represent some kind of female trickery. Last time I checked, women thought their health was sort of important. Toss in his eye-crossing claim that anyone who supports abortion rights is, by necessity, not going to be qualified to sit on the Supreme Court, and it was time to kiss women voters goodbye. How can a man who can see all the complexity and subtlety in foreign policy and health care reform talk to and about women and families in terms that persistently read like cave drawings?
McCain really proved tonight that his brand of feminism is frozen in 1960—an artless pander to the mommies tacked onto the claim that he is “proud” of his vice president. It's all reminiscent of the ad men on Mad Men, chivalrous but wrong.
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Can we look at a larger point about Joe the Plumber? Joe Wurzelbacher is, after all, a plumber. He didn't have his well-off parents send him off for his MBA or a law-school degree so he could get a cushy 9-to-5 job with an office and an assistant and good benefits. He's not a 25-year-old starting an Internet company with someone else's venture capital. He's gotten where he is today by unclogging our smelly toilets and fixing the pipes we probably should have had looked at before they burst.
He's been a plumber for 15 years. That's a lot of midnight calls and weekend shifts and probably a lot of years with low pay. If he's a smart small-business owner, and this interview seems to indicate he's not rash, he's going to take a chunk of those profits and expand his company—as he says, he would hire more plumbers, which requires more trucks and more equipment. All of which helps our economy.
Is $250,000 a year a lot of money? Certainly. But businesses with fewer than 20 employees account for over 20 million jobs in this country. That's not a small figure, and it's pretty comforting in a time when we watch unwieldy big businesses with eight-figure CEOs crashing down on a weekly basis. We should want our small businesses to succeed.
When I watch the video that made Joe famous, and I hear Barack Obama's comment that he wants to "spread the wealth around," I get chills down my spine. Joe wants to spread the wealth around, too. And it's his wealth. I trust him with it more than I trust the government. I hope he does get that plumbing business, and I hope he turns it into a $500,000-a-year business. And I won't begrudge him a single penny of it.
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Rosa -
You're so right to point out that we shouldn't feel sorry for "Joe the Plumber's" tax burden—he's about to buy a company and makes more money than most Americans ever will. Tonight's battle for Joe made me think of Swing Vote, the recent movie where the fate of an election hinges on one man: Kevin Costner. It also made me miss, of all people, John Edwards. Sure, he was annoyingly folksy on the campaign trail, but he also regularly made use of an important word that I haven't heard Obama or McCain mention in any of the debates. It begins with P, but it isn't plumber—it's poverty. When Obama and McCain talk about "average Joes," they mean middle-class Joes. At least John Edwards, for all his many sins, realized our problems go deeper, or lower, than the plight of small-business owners.
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Let's stop feeling so sad for poor Joe the Plumber, who just wants his teensy little piece of the American dream. In his original comments to Obama, Joe explained that he was about to buy a company that would make profits of about $270,000 a year. If that profit bumps Joe's own income over $250,000, then he'll be making more money per year than roughly 95 percent of his fellow Americans. In that case, yeah, as Obama explained to him, Joe won't be getting that middle-class tax cut.
Cry me a river. (The guy makes way more than money, I'll bet, than any of us poor XX bloggers. Maybe we can get him to redistribute a little free plumbing over here? Free plumbing for all: That's MY idea of the American dream.)
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According to the Washington Post, McCain got it wrong tonight when he said that, under Obama's health-care plan, Joe the plumber would pay a fine if he didn't provide his employees health insurance, because the Obama plan has an exemption for small businesses. Given that McCain from practically the first sentence trucked in Joe, last name and all, as his carefully planted and lovingly tended Real Guy, isn't this the definition of campaign malpractice? How could his staff have possibly failed to get Joe right? McCain was often strong tonight, on guard and on the offensive. But when he registered open-mouthed surprise as Obama explained why he was wrong about Joe, McCain looked like a man playing Tina Fey playing Sarah Palin asking for a life line. Obama had his weak moments, too, in the reaction shots, like the big smile he cracked while McCain was making serious charges about Bill Ayers and ACORN. Watching them listen sometimes seems more enlightening than listening to them talk.
Read more XX Factor posts about Joe the Plumber.
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Awhile back I wrote that Meghan McCain had learned to negotiate the difficult terrain of being a political daughter by oversharing on surface-level stuff, and keeping quiet on the truly personal. Looks like she hasn't quite stuck to that-on Hannity and Colmes, she revealed a bit more about the grudges she holds as a political daughter. She's mad about the Atlantic cover controversy, saying"I have a problem when it gets dirty and you're doctoring photos." Most striking is what she said about her support for Kerry and Gore, framing it as more of a vote against Bush, who ran a nasty smear campaign against her dad in the South Carolina primaries, than for the Democrats:
MCCAIN: I can be behind my father all day every day.
COLMES: Sure.
MCCAIN: . until the end of time. I just couldn't get behind President Bush. I just couldn't. It's personal.
COLMES: Yes. You couldn't get behind President Bush?
MCCAIN: It's personal. I was 19 at the time.
HANNITY: And it's a primary 2000.
(CROSSTALK)
COLMES: Hold on, let's.
MCCAIN: It had to do with my little sister, and like, you know, you were just saying that the wounds of a political child run really deep. And there are things that I don't know if I'll ever completely get over.
COLMES: Was it because of what happened in 2000 during the campaign?
MCCAIN: Yes.
COLMES: That you two -- what about your dad now? Is he -- looks like he may have.
MCCAIN: No. He's a great forgiver, move on-er. No. Yes.
Her decision to stump for her dad was obviously one made out of love and personal, rather than party, loyalty. And now she's got to stand there and justify her dad's politically expedient apostasy by saying he's a "mover on-er," and she's got to somehow justify to herself that even though she's been deeply hurt by negative campaigning, it's ok that the McCain campaign isn't exactly taking the high road these days. When I wrote about her earlier, I was impressed with the amount of agency I saw her taking-exploiting the publicity system lest it exploit you first isn't exactly a feminist battle cry, but at least it's not passive. Now, all I can think when I read this is "Poor Meghan, she's trapped." But am I getting played like a flute? Now's probably not a bad time to be reminding people that the McCains have been on the receiving end of smears, and Meghan, at her own admission, didn't go in to this thing a political naïf. This wasn't her first interview, and it wasn't the first time she's talked about the way the 2000 election affected her. Should I put back on my armor of cynicism?
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I'm not at all convinced that Obama's lead is safe, and I think that the positive poll numbers of late could result in liberal complacency on Election Day. But what's indisputable is that Obama's apparent advantage, and the Palin pick, are creating fissures in the Republican Party. Whether these fissures lead to a healthy shake-up, or a crack-up, has yet to be seen. Jed Lewison has a list of the "Republicans and conservatives jumping ship, pointing fingers, or otherwise abandoning the McCain campaign." It includes some of the names we've brought up recently, including Heather Mac Donald, Christopher Buckley, and David Frum, plus some others we hadn't noted.