The XX Factor: What women really think.

Hurray for Joe the Plumber

Can we look at a larger point about Joe the Plumber? Joe Wurzelbacher is, after all, a plumber. He didn't have his well-off parents send him off for his MBA or a law-school degree so he could get a cushy 9-to-5 job with an office and an assistant and good benefits. He's not a 25-year-old starting an Internet company with someone else's venture capital. He's gotten where he is today by unclogging our smelly toilets and fixing the pipes we probably should have had looked at before they burst.

He's been a plumber for 15 years. That's a lot of midnight calls and weekend shifts and probably a lot of years with low pay. If he's a smart small-business owner, and this interview seems to indicate he's not rash, he's going to take a chunk of those profits and expand his company—as he says, he would hire more plumbers, which requires more trucks and more equipment. All of which helps our economy.

Is $250,000 a year a lot of money? Certainly. But businesses with fewer than 20 employees account for over 20 million jobs in this country. That's not a small figure, and it's pretty comforting in a time when we watch unwieldy big businesses with eight-figure CEOs crashing down on a weekly basis. We should want our small businesses to succeed.

When I watch the video that made Joe famous, and I hear Barack Obama's comment that he wants to "spread the wealth around," I get chills down my spine. Joe wants to spread the wealth around, too. And it's his wealth. I trust him with it more than I trust the government. I hope he does get that plumbing business, and I hope he turns it into a $500,000-a-year business. And I won't begrudge him a single penny of it.

Joe the Plutocrat

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.)

Say It Ain't So, Joe

According to the Washington Post, McCain got it wrong tonight when he said that, under Obama's health-care plan, Joe the plumber would pay a fine if he didn't provide his employees health insurance, because the Obama plan has an exemption for small businesses. Given that McCain from practically the first sentence trucked in Joe, last name and all, as his carefully planted and lovingly tended Real Guy, isn't this the definition of campaign malpractice? How could his staff have possibly failed to get Joe right? McCain was often strong tonight, on guard and on the offensive. But when he registered open-mouthed surprise as Obama explained why he was wrong about Joe, McCain looked like a man playing Tina Fey playing Sarah Palin asking for a life line. Obama had his weak moments, too, in the reaction shots, like the big smile he cracked while McCain was making serious charges about Bill Ayers and ACORN. Watching them listen sometimes seems more enlightening than listening to them talk.

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