Obama on the campaign trail today:
By the end of the week, he'll be accusing me of being a secret communist because I shared my toys in Kindergarten.
While I like this quote a lot, as I'm sure many of you do, I still find myself worrying a little. I worry a little because as silly as Palin and McCain's feverish Red-baiting sounds to us (and Obama, as the quote suggests), there is still Joe the Plumber to worry about. Not the tax-dodging, non-plumbing, fraud that McCain sought to have stand in as the metaphorical "regular" American. No, I'm talking about the people that Joe the Plumber actually does represent in a metaphorical sense--the millions of Americans who consistently vote against their economic interests and in the process, cost Democrats control of our government.
As silly as the Marxist-Communist narrative is, I hope someone in the Obama campaign is getting out the message to the wavering folks in Pennsylvania and Ohio that McCain's accusations of communism arise from Obama's dastardly plan to increase the tax rate on the richest Americans by a measly three freakin' percent. You know, the same rates in place when Commissar Clinton was running the Politburo.
To be honest, it's not an easy task and I can understand why the Obama folks would resort to humor. I don't know how you reason with people like Joe the Plumber, who no matter how many times you tell him he won't suffer under Obama's plan and will actually get a bigger tax cut than he would from McCain--he STILL thinks Obama's a Bolshevik. I don't know what you do with this kind of willful disconnect from reality. But don't reassure me that people who think like JTP were going to vote for McCain anyway. What I worry is that many of these people are still looking for a reason, any reason, even an aggressively stupid one, to not vote for Obama.
And so, the question remains with five days to go:
Are there are still enough Joe the Plumber's to flush this country down the toilet?
I am hopeful that the answer is no. And by the way, WHEN Obama is elected next Tuesday, I want Joe the Plumber on record saying he will reject the tax cut he will receive from Premier Obama. After all, he wouldn't want someone else's wealth, right?