Comeback: "Joe the Plumber" Is Back

Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher, better known by his nickname “Joe the Plumber,” acquired during the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign, announced Tuesday his candidacy for U.S. Congress.

He has made it clear that he will be running on the Republican Party ticket for one of Ohio’s seats in the House of Representatives. “If I am coming off as angry, it’s because I am,” he said in a video declaring his candidacy, which was posted on FoxToledo.com and shot at Tony Packo’s restaurant in Toledo, Ohio.

“I just can’t stand it when people do bad work. And we’ve been voting, the last 40 or 50 years, (for) bad people to do bad things to us. Why have we been doing it? Because we don’t take our civic responsibility seriously enough,” he added.

He is running against Democrat, Marcy Kaptur, who entered the House of Representatives in 1982.

In 2008 when Barack Obama, then Democratic candidate, campaigned by going door-to-door in a residential area in Holland, Ohio, Wurzelbacher posed questions regarding the effects of the fiscal plan on American small businesses, including his own.

Shortly after, during a televised debate before the election, the Republican candidate John McCain presented him as an example of a future victim of Barack Obama’s fiscal program. The two adversaries proceeded to make reference to this man more than 10 times.

“Under his new moniker, Joe the Plumber became the everyman of right-wing America, his shaved pate and burly chest a representation in masculine form of the threat posed by Obama’s alien socialism to the honest, God-fearing hinterland,” wrote the British newspaper The Guardian.

Wurzelbacher’s reputation, however, was marred when he revealed that he did not possess a plumber’s license.

Joe the Plumber’s campaign can be followed on his Twitter account (@JoeWurzelbacher) and on his Facebook page. (http://www.facebook.com/TheRealJoethePlumber)