Good thing for John McCain that he didn’t call on New Haven‘s Joe The Plumber to try to resuscitate his presidential campaign.
New Haven’s Joe the Plumber is 6‑foot-three-inch, 300-pound Joe Proto. Proto, 59, has been fixing pipes and unclogging drains for 42 years. (He’s pictured during a break on a job at Yale Divinity School Thursday, displaying tattoos of his two grandchildren.)
Proto didn’t see John McCain Wednesday night invoke a man named Joe The Plumber 23 times during the Republican presidential candidate’s final debate with Democrat Barack Obama. Proto was watching the Phillies-Dodgers game instead. “I’m a Joe Torre fan,” he explained.
He’s most decidedly not a John McCain or a Barack Obama fan. And when he turned on Good Morning America Thursday morning and caught up on the “Joe the Plumber” shtick, he lost some respect for McCain.
“Here we go again,” Proto said later on Thursday. “It’s a sad statement. Here’s a hero for our country [McCain], 100 percent, using this as a political game. It’s just a game.”
“Ever play basketball?” Proto asked. “When the ref’s not looking, you throw elbows. Well, everybody’s looking [at McCain] — and he’s still throwing elbows.”
On that show Proto saw how McCain made the Joe the Plumber story the centerpiece of his campaign performance. He saw how McCain used the story of the Ohio plumber Joe Wurzelbacher to attack Obama. (Click here to watch that Good Morning America report.)
He saw how McCain fudged that Joe the Plumber’s story. Wurzelbacher had confronted Obama on the campaign trail recently. He said he might want to buy his plumbing business one day. He said he feared Obama’s economic proposal would mean he’d see his taxes rise. It turned out that Obama’s plan would not raise Wurzelbacher’s taxes — even if he did buy the company. (Obama would raise taxes on people earning more than $250,000 a year, but not on businesses earning $250,000 a year.)
Joe Proto was already familiar with that story. He’d seen the original confrontation between Wurzelbacher and Obama on TV. And he noticed, Thursday morning, that Wurzelbacher isn’t even necessarily buying the plumbing business he asked Obama about.
Joe Proto is precisely the kind of voter McCain needed to reach in Wednesday night’s debate in order to rescue his faltering campaign — an undecided voter concerned above all about the state of the economy.
Proto remains undecided.
“I’m not impressed with either or,” he said. “We accept this as voters. Nobody’s feet is ever held to the fire.”
“I’ll tell you this much. I tell the younger guys, if the [candidate]‘s a Martian, I don’t care. As long as he helps turn things around.”
Proto makes around $60,000 a year — $190,000 less than he’d need to make to see his taxes rise under Obama’s economic proposal.