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So, news outlets reported that yesterday Joe Biden told fundraisers in Seattle that in the next six months an international crisis would "test" Barack Obama just as one had tested Kennedy. According to reports, Biden told supporters: "The world is looking. We're about to elect a brilliant 47-year-old senator president of the United States. Watch, we're going to have an international crisis, a generated crisis, to test the mettle of this guy." The gist in part seems to be that Obama is as brilliant as Kennedy. But one wonders why, exactly, Biden felt he had to say this now, since it opened Obama up to an easy counterattack, which McCain promptly seized. At a rally this afternoon, he asked crowds why they'd want to elect a president whose mettle the world feels primed to test--i.e., a president who has so little experience he seems an easy target, or at least an urgent target.
Meanwhile, according to CNN, McCain has been closing ground in one poll, which asked voters who they supported for president, leaving Obama with a five-point lead compared to the eight-point one he had at the beginning of the month. These polls are changing all the time. But maybe not a good time for Biden to be acting as if Obama has the race locked up.
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Watch the amazing video of John McCain and Barack Obama at tonight’s Alfred E Smith Memorial Dinner in New York. It’s not just that both of them are wreck-yer-mascara funny. They are. And it’s not just that they let themselves laugh out loud at each other’s jokes. They do. The really stunning part is getting to see them both again the way they were back when we loved and adored them: two men in full, completely inhabiting their quirky, funny, inspirational selves. Watching them makes you wonder who these freaky spectral candidates are—the boring squashed-up versions of Obama and McCain we've endured through the end of last night’s debate. It makes you wonder what it is about presidential politics in 2008 that sucks out what’s best in our candidates and leaves us with a distillate of small, safe, hard, angry little men.
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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.
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Dana, I kind of agree with you but for different reasons: I don't have much sympathy for Palin, cringe as I might through those interviews at her ignorance on some major issues, simply because I don't think she shows much sympathy for other victims in her political views. I can never get past her providing no exception for victims of rape and incest in cases of abortion. A rape victim is supposed to bear the child of a violent crime against herself because she failed to fight hard enough to ward her aggressor off or get him to wear a condom? That's a pretty unsympathetic message to women, I think. And if Palin is going to live by that kind of sympathy sword, she does risk dying by it.
That said, I don't like to engage in too much schadenfreude because, well, I think it's uncharitable, and I believe it comes back to haunt you. It's partly why I've quelled my outrage at the McCain camp's nastiness—ever since the sneering, community organizer-mocking speeches of Guiliani and Palin at the GOP Convention, I've been dying to see the Democrats hit back as low below the belt as they were being punched—the jeering at helping laid-off people recoup their lives. (Call me a bleeding-heart liberal, but I think it rather mean-spirited to mock someone for trying to help people who'd lost their livelihoods, which is essentially everything. I bet none of those laughing had ever been laid off.) But they haven't as much as they could have, and I think it's actually paying off. Obama—at least currently—isn't the one imploding. There's still time left in this campaign; that all might change. But it's nice to see that taking a bit of the high road does actually turn out to pay off at times.
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Because I want to play in the sandbox, too! Upon my return from voting in the Ohio primary, I read Meghan's post about how Democrats in Texas are excited to vote and caucus. Not only is my corner of the state lacking Texas' "cool, bright" weather (we have dreary, unending rain), but my party is seriously hurting for excitement. I live in one of the more conservative congressional districts in the state (Yes, we're responsible for Jean Schmidt. Sorry about that), and, with McCain having the nomination locked up, most of the action seems to be focusing on school levies and the heated race for county commissioner. Aside from the one Huckabee sign I saw and a few dozen loyal Ron Paul supporters, you can hardly tell there's a presidential race going on.
I'm left jumping at bits of gossip that I get about that other, more interesting race. The local news reported this morning that there were long lines in some precincts because people were asking to change their party registration—I'd think that would bode well for Obama, unless there are that many Republicans crossing the aisle to vote for Hillary because they want to face her in the fall. And—big news—Obama's campaign just moved the party for his Cincinnati supporters to a bigger location.
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