Two Perspectives on Ohio's Favorite Unlicensed Plumber

I've become increasingly fascinated by Joe the Plumber, particularly because he embodies a sort of poignant absurdity that I've come to expect from Our Great State of Ohio.

Here are two interesting perspectives I just came across, which I'm filing away for later use....

First, from Extraordinary Observations:

When the McCain campaign decided to use Joe "the plumber" Wurzelbacher as the spokesperson for average, hard-working, entrepreneurial Americans, they actually demonstrated that success in America isn't all about being dedicated and hard-working; that major success comes from being in the right place at the right time, and that sometimes you don't even need to work hard to get there . . .

Unless the symbolic "everyman" is supposed to represent a celebrity, then Joe the plumber no longer exemplifies average people. The hypocrisy, of course, is that Joe is supposed to stand for a very specific ideal: that government shouldn't reward or punish people based on anything other than their hard work. If anything, Joe has become the target of his own criticism: someone who receives something unfairly, as a result of someone else's hard work!

And second, from Columbia law professor Patricia Williams, in an interview with Bill Moyers last week:

And, but the new black working class is literally any black person who has a job all the way up through Oprah Winfrey. And then upper class is almost invisible. We don't deny that there is an upper class. And that's why I think, you know, people like John McCain and George Bush can say that they are sort of Joe Six Pack rather than the true elites, I mean, in terms of — at least in terms of income.

And so all of that has very invisible weight to it. So that's why I think that, for example, Joe the Plumber becomes an icon of somebody who wants to buy a $250,000 business at least. But at the same time, really seems to have resented and denied the fact that he's earning $40,000 and has a lien on his house. So he's both the product of a kind of fantasy of what he ought to be and a deep resentment of where he actually is in the economic stratum.

And that, you know, that resentment, the distinction between where he wants to be and where he actually is, you know, the emotional foundation of what I think we really have to work with to get people to come together.

[emphasis all mine]