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I take back what I said about his bright future even as a Fox News star.
Joe is a faux plumber! (Quel horreur!) And a tax scofflaw! And something about Obama just happens to remind him of Sammy Davis Jr.! And-- if true, this next thing is weirder than weird—Joe may be related by marriage to Charles Keating, star of the S &L scandal that almost ended McCain's Senate career! And—his name's not even Joe!
By now I am starting to feel kind of sorry for Joe. Faux Joe. Samuel. Whatever his name is. He registered as a Republican last spring. By now, he's probably having second thoughts about how great it is to be championed by John McCain before a viewing audience of 38 million U.S. households.
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I'm still not worried about Joe the Plumber. For one thing, the guy's now the most famous plumber in America, and I'd say he's got a future as a Fox News star.
But for another, Emily, he's fine either way: If he buys this company and it doesn't make enough to push his personal income over $250,000, then he gets no Obama tax increase, and depending on his income level, he very likely gets one of those Obama tax cuts. Lucky fella. And if his company's profits do push him over $250,000 (I can't find the link, but I believe that in an interview he says they probably would), then his marginal tax rate would go up a tad under Obama's plan, but he's still making far, far more than most of his fellow Americans—and keeping most of it, too.
So what's the problem here for Joe? He'd rather not have his marginal tax rate increase. OK, I get that. But no one—certainly not Obama—is suggesting he didn't work hard to get his money, or that he's not "entitled to keep most of it." We're talking about a small increase in the marginal tax rate for Americans in the top fifth percentile of incomes, not about nationalizing Joe's plumbing business. (Much as I'd like free government-provided plumbing ...)
I guess I just don't see why Obama's comment about wanting to "spread the wealth around" strikes fear into anyone's heart. That's what the progressive income tax is supposed to do—and no one really questions the core concept, just the details (What should the highest marginal tax rate be? What should the income threshold be? etc.). Right now, given the stunning levels of income inequality in this country, both parties agree that we need to spread the weath around a bit. The question is just what mechanism will most effectively do the trick. Is it improving education while cutting taxes for all, as McCain proposes?Or is it tax cuts for the lower 95 percent and marginal tax rate increases for the wealthiest 5 percent, including, hypothetically, Joe the Plumber—if he hits the big time?
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McCain scored some shots tonight. He made a strong point about Obama's wanting to "spread the wealth around" from Joe the Plumber, and I was surprised Obama didn't seem prepared for that. (And Rosa and Juliet, Joe said the business "makes" about $250,000 a year—we don't know if that's gross or net income, so we have no idea what his personal income would be. But in any case, I'm with Rachael in believing Joe's entitled keep most of it.) McCain was much better on the need to support the free-trade agreement with Colombia, which has been a strong U.S. ally. Obama's answer was weak and weasely. But none of this really makes any difference, because when you watch McCain for an extended period, there is something off about him. His angry facial tics, his strange shorthand, inside-Washington way of talking. Half the time, unless you already knew what he was talking about, you'd have no idea what he was talking about. There's a guy at my gym who's always muttering curses under his breath as he does his circuit, and I think of him as "Seething Man." McCain was Seething Man tonight, and Obama was "Reassuring Man," and people want reassurance now more than ever.
Also, what was with Bob Schieffer? For the last hour in particular his questions were all variations of "Senator, would you like education to be better or worse in this country? And please include as much of your stump speech in the answer as possible."
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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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But wouldn't it be better for all of us if Sarah Palin turned out not to be the third-rate bullshit artist she's been taken for? The main reason I'd take no pleasure in seeing her flail around tonight is that she could very well wind up in the Oval Office. So, I'd just as soon discover she's a woman of great depth and vision, too nuanced in her thinking and respectful of precedent to dismiss Supreme Court decisions on the fly.
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Damn, man, whatever happened to Schadenfreude? Isn’t anyone here going to enjoy seeing Sarah Palin struggle tonight? God knows I can identify with the sympathy angle—I once gave a job talk at Brown that felt, from my end, a lot like that Katie Couric interview – but in no way does that translate into hoping she does well enough to redeem herself in the debate, in order to somehow represent on behalf of women in general. On the contrary: I’m looking forward to watching Palin flail (and come on, people, in an unscripted and explicitly polemical format she’s going to flail like an Alaska salmon on the dock.) To me, watching her incompetence get exposed is like payback for the last eight years of staring at a naked, and thoroughly unattractive, emperor. And you know what? I was a lot more qualified for that Brown job than Palin is for VP, but I still wasn’t the best candidate, and my prospective employers deserved to find that out.
I think both compassionate people like the rest of you and spiteful harpies like myself can agree that cutting Palin extra slack – whether because of her gender or her supposed persecution at the hands of “the press” – is a profoundly unfeminist thing to do. And while I agree that strategically, Biden will be wise to tiptoe around Palin’s gender (avoiding the appearance of condescension, etc.), I look forward to a brave post-feminist world in which, one day, the debate partners of lightweights like Palin will be at liberty to mop the floor with said lightweights—not because they’re women (or men), but because they’re arrogant fools.
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Kathleen Parker says her fellow conservative Sarah Palin has exhausted her cringe reflex, and I hear her on that. Mine has been overtaxed for years. Remember the presidential debate for which some malevolent (or high, maybe?) makeup artist painted Al Gore orange? In the privacy of my living room, I listened to most of that one with my sweatshirt pulled up over my eyes because it was too painful to watch. At the first presidential debate in '04, in Miami, I even had to look away from George W., about whom I am not aware of ever having had an admiring thought, because watching him flounder around babbling that being president, well, "it's hard work ... it's hard work ... it's hard work'' just felt cruel. So am I hoping that both Palin and Joe Biden do well enough tonight that I won't have to avert my eyes? No, because my comfort level isn't the point; their competence is. No, because even the most lopsided debate can help the perceived loser more than the supposed winner; there are no straight lines between cause and effect in politics, which I have to admit is part of the attraction, warped as that may be. No, because women have the same right to be underprepared that men have always had. And no, because voters make me even more nervous than candidates do, so whatever happens tonight is still just the prelims.
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I suppose the eternal mystery of this campaign remains that the same Barack Obama who is one of the most gifted speakers and writers of our lifetimes can manage to be such a bland, wonky, tentative debater. My own sense is that after watching John McCain careening around the country all week on the express train to Crazyville, bland and wonky seems kind of reassuring. I could wish that Obama would stop agreeing with McCain and praising his great leadership, especially after the ninth time McCain implied he wasn’t quite ready to trade in his pull-ups for the Batman underpants.
Still. Big props to McCain for stating that we “must never torture a prisoner ever again.” It shows that McCain—unlike Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Gonzales, Mukasey, Feith. et al—is sufficiently honest to admit that yes we have been torturing prisoners and yes it’s shocking. McCain has said this before although he also disappointed a lot of us when he declined to vote last winter to force the CIA to conform their interrogation techniques to the Army Field Manual (enabling the United States to officially ban torture while still retaining the ability to say, “I know a guy”). If both candidates for president can say aloud that the United States has permitted torture, and understand the significance of that for the rest of the world, it gives me some cause for hope. Not for war crimes prosecutions. I didn’t say I’m drunk here. But at least for some kind of moral reckoning when all this insanity comes to an end.
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It's interesting that you're focusing on Obama and I on Clinton. But if she does have superior positions and intellectual firepower, plus near-universal name recognition and every institutional advantage in the world, doesn't that make her inability to sell this Aston Martin of a candidacy even worse? What an indictment of her political skills—and surely some indication of what she could accomplish if elected, no?
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Have you no shame, Madam, in your shocking refusal to see things exactly as I do? Nah—but tone and temperament do matter, not only in winning elections but in working with Congress, moving public opinion, and negotiating with our allies and adversaries around the world. I just didn't hear Hillary's answers the same way you did, Hanna; treating relatively minor differences between her health-care plan and Obama's as monumental and catastrophic seems to me to be precisely the kind of all-or-nothing thinking that doomed her previous efforts. And even if she were better on paper, after the Bush years a lot of people want a president they can stand to watch on television.
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On the campaign trail, Chelsea Clinton compares her mom to Margaret Thatcher. But can you imagine Thatcher whimpering that it seemed like she always had to go first in debates, and that just wasn't fair? One thinks not, and I was surprised when Hillary Clinton did so last night. In so enthusiastically casting herself as the injured party, she undercuts her central argument about what a rock she is and comes across as more a whiner than a fighter.
Barack Obama had just refused his shot at aggrievement; he said he took her at her word that she didn't know anything about how a photo of him in traditional African garb got leaked to Matt Drudge. Then he briskly moved on. So, it seemed extra small when, after repeatedly extending a back-and-forth on health care, she then complained at length about being asked to go first in answering the next question, about NAFTA. Normally, debaters like to go first, but she tried to make this seem like part of the vast media conspiracy against her:
"Can I just point out that in the last several debates I seem to get the first question all the time, and I don't mind, you know, I'll be happy to field them. But I do find it curious, and if anybody saw Saturday Night Live,'' she said, referring to a skit in which the press is seen waiting Obama hand and foot, "you know, maybe we should ask Barack if he's comfortable and needs another pillow. I just find it kind of curious that I keep getting the first question on all these issues,'' she repeated, throwing her arms up in frustration, "but I'm happy to answer it.'' Just like your mom is happy to sit home in the dark alone, insisting Oh, don't worry about me.
Clinton also tried to stop Brian Williams from cutting to a commercial -- a losing proposition if ever there was one. And she suggested that she would have made her tax returns public by now if she weren't already too overburdened to sleep. When asked if she would release the returns before the Texas and Ohio primaries next Tuesday, she answered, "I can't get it together by then, but I will certainly work to get it together. I'm a little busy right now; I barely have time to sleep.''
She did show 12 kinds of chutzpah, though, in calling out Obama for merely denouncing rather than denouncing and rejecting Louis Farrakhan, who recently endorsed him: She noted that she, by contrast, had made clear during her first Senate race that she would not accept the support of an independent party with a history of anti-Semitism. Which was a bold boast, given that this was around the same time she listened as Yasser Arafat's wife, Suha, accused the Israelis of gassing women and children on a daily basis; after the speech, Clinton rose and kissed Mrs. Arafat on both cheeks.
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Over on his blog at Psychology Today, frequent Slate contributor Peter D. Kramer (author of, among other things, Listening to Prozac) notes what plenty are rushing to note: that Clinton, having accused Obama of Xeroxing, went ahead and echoed other people's lines herself last night. But Kramer—astute psychiatrist that he is—probes a little further and notices that she cribs when she's reaching to express emotion, when she's trying to be heartfelt. And then he pushes a bit more, beyond the usual gender point that it's ironic to find the female failing to convey empathy persuasively. Instead, Kramer focuses on the partisan implications: Democratic candidates, he proposes, "only prevail if they have substantial social skills." Republicans can get away with being stiffer, less sincere. Think of the losers Kerry, Gore, Dukakis: wooden, not "whole people" on the stump. And think of Nixon, a winner. If you buy Kramer's formula, the best Democratic choice this time around is obvious. Does the insight, I wonder, also suggest McCain wouldn't be wrong to bet he could get away with less than his usual straight talk?
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C'mon, John, there was one great moment in last night's GOP debate: When Mitt Romney sneered that John McCain couldn't be too darn conservative or else the New York Times wouldn't have endorsed him, hehhehheh, and McCain flipped him his riposte—something about then how come both of Romney's own hometown papers, including the superconservative Boston Herald, had endorsed McCain, too, huh? The killing part was not what McCain said, but how he returned Romney's phony laugh, hehhehheh, soooo sarcastically, and right up in Romney's face. So that for a couple of seconds, as they were nose-to-nose doing this and wagging their heads back and forth, I was actually hopeful that the whole thing might end in a head-butt. Alas, that was not to be. But Romney still looks shocked anew every time McCain answers him, so maybe that's why he failed to move in for the kill. And wouldn't you have loved to have seen the thought bubble over Nancy Reagan's head when Mike Huckabee took her arm—thank goodness someone did, because I was afraid she was going to fall—and then spent ages patting her hand?
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All three of the Democratic presidential contenders insist that the next occupant of the Oval Office has got to be more open and honest with the American people. After seven years of gut-instinct infallibility, who could disagree? Yet when asked at last night's debate to be honest and open about their own greatest shortcomings, John Edwards did a searching moral inventory and concluded that he might have too much empathy: "I sometimes have a very powerful emotional response to pain.'' Hillary Clinton allowed that she wants change so badly that she does not, in fact, possess infinite patience: "I get, you know, really frustrated when people don't seem to understand that we can do so much more to help each other.'' Not only is she impatient, but "sometimes I come across that way.''
Only Barack Obama named a true human failing -- that he can be disorganized, to the point that his staff knows never to hand him a piece of paper more than two seconds before he needs it "because I will lose it ... and my desk and my office doesn't look good. I've got to have somebody around me who is keeping track of that stuff.'' Which shouldn't be a big deal, but because politicians so rarely cop to anything real, it is. Sometimes, whether accidentally or on purpose, candidates actually provide us with important information about themselves. And for voters who really do want more honesty -- and self-awareness -- from their next president, this was one of those times.
The answers Obama and Clinton gave line up with what we already know about them. Instead of obfuscating, Obama has written about how he messed around with drugs as a teenager and went through a period when he and his wife, Michelle, were barely speaking. Whereas Clinton, who is asking to be judged on the basis of her experience as First Lady, was certainly not a known champion of transparency when she lived in the White House the first time. From the beginning of her husband's presidency, her attitude toward the press was combative, even when it didn't need to be. Her secretiveness about health-care reform undermined her efforts on the biggest job she ever took on. To this day, no one knows how the missing Rose Law Firm billing records mysteriously reappeared in the White House residence two years after they were subpoenaed. Part of her pitch is that she's learned from her past mistakes, yet in her autobiography, Living History, history has been airbrushed beyond recognition. Which makes Obama's admission of the absolutely obvious -- nobody's perfect -- a bigger mark in his favor than it really ought to be. Now it will be interesting to see if voters are being honest when they say they want honesty.
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Watching the tragedy of Benazir Bhutto's assassination unfold Thursday should have provided a sobering reality check for everyone who bemoans the state of politics in this country. We can go on endlessly about how divided our electorate is, about how no one listens to anyone on the other side of the spectrum, but—while we may not be living in a golden age of debate—things rarely get more out of control than some stolen yard signs or missing Ws on the White House keyboards. I might not like it if Hillary Clinton gets to move back into the White House, and you might shudder at the thought of another GOP administration, but none of us are likely to take up arms or wish for the death of their ideological adversaries.
Except for maybe Dave Lindorff, who says, in a column that got play on Drudge and InstaPundit, that global warming and the accompanying rise in sea levels have a "silver lining." He's looking forward to the day (in a shorter time frame than I've seen cited by even the most alarmist environmentalist) when most of Red America is wiped out by flooding or drought. I wish I could write this off as the unhinged rantings of a fringe blogger, but Lindorff is, according to his Wikipedia page and the bio on the article, a two-time Fulbright scholar and a published author.
Before Lindorff next sits down at his keyboard and cackles to himself about how riotously hilarious he is for telling us backward bumpkins in the Midwest that we're gonna git what's comin' to us, he should pause and realize that dying for your political beliefs is a very real possibility in parts of this world, and that there's nothing funny or clever about it.