Joe, the Plumber from Hell

The dream of every campaign strategist is to create a trend that ignites a spark and spreads the notion that the victory of their candidate is not only the best, but is also inevitable.

You can hear the grinding of teeth in the American reactionary political community with this in mind. You can almost hear the shaking. The desperation is palpable and the spokespeople of conservative America are beginning to admit it.

Linda Chavez, an “ex-liberal” Latina remade as an ultra-conservative and a classic example of the self-hating minority, is also one the right wing pundits who admit that they are confronting a “great challenge”, and that, after the next election, “conservatives will have a more difficult time making our influence felt than at any time in recent memory,” she writes in her column.

The dream of every electoral strategist is to start a trend that ignites a spark among citizens and spreads the sensation that the victory of their candidate would not only be for the best, but that it is inevitable and better for them to join. If a strategy cannot create this trend, it should at least try to get on board with existing trends and adapt its candidate to place him at the crest of the wave.

In other words, make the candidate stylish. That effort, assessing the state of public consciousness and turning it into the central message of the campaign, is what Obama has managed to do with incredible success, seizing the notion of indispensable change and urgent renewal.

Despite the fact that at some point McCain rebounded and Sarah Palin appeared to be a brilliant choice for vice-president, the trend, fomented by a catastrophic economic crisis, indicates that it’s time for the Republicans to go home to sleep.

Everything has gone wrong for them. After Palin’s vigorous and fearsome entrance on the scene, the conservative base emboldened itself only to be promptly humiliated. A few interviews later, it was clear that Sarah was not capable of governing the country, and subsequent declarations have made her more of a caricature than a candidate. More recently, the scandal surrounding the expenditure of $150,000 on clothing and hairdressers has ended up destroying her image.

And then, Joe the Plumber entered the picture. The common man, Joe Six Pack. The simple man who challenges Obama and asks him, “Your tax plan is going to hurt me, won’t it?” The conservatives had found their gold mine.

McCain has mentioned Joe more than ten times in his speeches, trying to turn him into the definition of the good American threatened by the “leftist” policies of Obama. Initially the strategy worked. “God bless him. Joe the plumber, that is, for coaxing from Sen. Obama his true motive for raising taxes,” wrote Mona Charen. “It isn’t to fund the government, or deal with the deficit, or to establish a rainy day fund. It’s to “spread the wealth around,” which the Illinois senator insists is ‘good for everyone.’”

Obama promised, in fact, to lower taxes for the working class and raise them for the rich, striking down Bush’s evidently failed framework. But the right has virulently attacked him, characterizing the redistribution of wealth as something terrible–demoralizing the rich and spreading laziness among the poor–and, above all, anti-American. It is, God forgive us, socialism.

The little plumber threatened to become a nightmare for the Democrat, who suffers from the eternal accusation of being too cultured (he likes arugula) to hold power over the rednecks–a message that damaged Kerry greatly in 2004.

Already embroiled in the dirtiest campaign in American history, McCain is insisting that Joe represents all of the poor Americans that would suffer from Obama’s policies, when in reality it is exactly the opposite; his plan will benefit all those earning less than $250,000 (which includes plumbers).

McCain has also accused Obama (without proof) of having ties to a certain local terrorist, Bill Ayers, while he himself has on his record a number of friendly meetings with the Chilean dictator and famous terrorist Augusto Pinochet.

The image of Joe, the Plumber from Hell, began to deflate when it came out that he had problems with the IRS, but mostly the problem stemmed from the fact that the use and abuse of his persona contained so many other lies.

The great tragedy of McCain is that, whatever he does, he will not manage to ride the wave that at one time he could have caught. The trend of the moment–transformation–could not be countered by Palin or Joe, nor by the ridiculous (and ignorant) accusations about socialism.

McCain is not only on the verge of losing the election; he has abandoned his dignity in the process. And with him he is taking down not only Palin and the American reactionary sphere, but also the international right-wing, which is now frantically trying to distance itself. McCain is finalizing the burial of Bush’s true victim: savage capitalism.