Joe The Plunber

I love this guy, really I do.

If you're not as obsessed with the US election which began early voting today (in Florida, home of the racist old people seen on the Daily Show), you probably still heard about Joe the Plunber, who had a go at Obama's tax plans by poiting out that if he achieved his dream of owning his plumbing company his tax would go up. This implicates Obama in a very un-American plot to tax the successful, something that is potentially very harmful to his message.

So good an opportunity was this for points scoring that McCain referenced our Joe 20 times in the last debate, in fact he barely talked about anything else! Thing is... Joe The Plumber isn;t a McCain voter... he's not admitted who he's voting for and, get this, his names not Joe (it's Sam)... and he's not qualified to be a plumber. Oh, and he owes $1200 in back taxes.

Is this really who McCain wants to be the centrepiece of his last two weeks of campaigning?

Who cares anyway? It turns out that Joe (or Sam) couldn't buy the plumbing firm he works for even if he came back in twenty years. How "ordinary" is such a voter anyway? How many Americans have enough capital to buy a $250,000 company?

It's a sad fact of political campaigning that massive issues usually get reduced to tiny levels, the whole American populace cannot be represented by one man after all. I hate to sound like a bleating political type, but this genuinely is the effect of the media, who like their story to take place in a very small area so they can really be lazy about it.

Me, I'm surprised that noone takes McCain up on the issue of contradicting himself over the current economic situation. He says on one hand it's caused by lack of effective regulation, but on the other hand he says he wants government to keep out of banks business in future. How does that work?

I am also sick of the Republicans trying to make Obama a terrorist - based on nothing but his colour and his name. That's just plain racism guys!

As for who I want to win the election, I think it's probably Obama - I have no real problem with McCain as a presidential candidate, by the way - my beef statrted when he picked his VP candidate. More on that, no doubt, at another time.

A