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Dahlia, Jessica,
Like you, I'm not entirely surprised by the depressing Girl Scout stats. But two thoughts spring to mind: First, I wonder what a poll of girls 9-12 would show. In my anecdotal experience with pre-teens this past election (my mother ran a secondary school that I used to spend time in), the girls in the 10-year-old range were picking up the excitement of the fact that Hillary and Sarah Palin were strong female candidates, and little of the debate over it. Second, adolescent girls are hitting that moment when they do begin to doubt themselves (the Reviving Ophelia moment) and so I wonder if this age group was particularly susceptible to absorbing the glass ceiling message. Just speculation. It'd be interesting to know more.
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Dahlia, you're right that at face value, those Girl Scouts stats are disheartening. But the silver lining may be that these girls are thinking about themselves in leadership positions in the first place. As a teen, I never considered women in politics at all. I was not an especially political adolescent, but I didn't think about the glass ceiling for women running for office because I wasn't even in the room. That girls are even considering those barriers in the first place might be a small step in the right direction. At least Sarah Palin and Hillary Clinton are now sharing brain space with Taylor Swift and Zac Efron.
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Courtesy of Feministing, a new study launched by the Girl Scout Research Institute shows that girls between the ages of 13 and 17 came away from this past presidential election with some very mixed feelings about females and power. On the one hand, these young women report big increases in engagement in politics, their confidence in discussing political issues, and their sense of their own power to change things in this country. But the numbers also show a huge uptick in their awareness of barriers for women. For instance, 43 percent of girls strongly believe that "girls have to work harder than boys in order to gain positions of leadership." (Just 25 percent of girls agreed with that statement only one year ago.) And the percentage of girls who believe that "both men and women have an equal chance of getting a leadership position" has declined from 35 percent to 24 percent in one short year. Zounds.
None of this surprises me. This election seems to have inspired and discouraged most of the women I know in just about equal measure. But I hadn’t stopped to think about how that would be experienced by a 15-year-old girl, who suddenly feels powerful and smart enough to change the world but deeply doubtful that she will get the chance.
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Marjorie, as for whether Sarah Palin believed Africa was a country not a continent, no I don't have any concrete evidence. Since she was so new to the national scene in August, Google isn't exactly bursting with transcripts of her speaking about Africa. But the only "evidence" we have that she did think Africa was a country was an unnamed source who spoke out in the aftermath of a painful election loss, a loss about which the finger-pointing started before the votes were counted. And please don't pillory me for bringing up Elaine Lafferty again, but Lafferty in this interview says that Palin had an in-depth knowledge of Afghanistan and the Taliban, showing a level of thought that doesn't mesh well with thinking Africa is a country. Rich Lowry at the National Review quotes Steve Biegun, who briefed Palin on foreign policy and who was part of the conversation that led to the NAFTA crack, and Biegun sticks up for Palin.
As for the clothes, the first nasty leak we heard was that she was told to leave her clothing at home in Wasilla because it was unsuitable. Now, when the election is over and someone wants to make her look bad, we hear that she was instructed to buy three suits for the convention and nothing more and that she was a "hillbilly looting Neiman Marcus." Both can't be true, so which is it? If she was dressing herself like this before the campaign, how did she become such an expert on fashion overnight? And for her personal preferences, she came out of the voting booth last Tuesday wearing a jacket that I'd expect to find at Cabela's, not Nordstrom or Saks.
From the moment she was announced as the GOP veep candidate, critics were only too quick to believe everything negative about her, true or not, and cite it as gospel. As Palin herself said, someone accused her of trying to ban Harry Potter when the book wasn't written yet. The New York Times printed as fact that she charged victims for their rape kits when she was mayor of Wasilla, even though the city looked back through its records and found no evidence to the claim. So pardon me for not jumping to assume the worst in this instance, either.
I understand that she did not appeal to everyone, and I certainly understand why. And I'm sure there are many people who hope she's gone back to Alaska never to be heard from again. Personally, I'm still waiting to see what comes out of all the introspection and self-critiquing that conservatives have spent the last week engaging in before I start thinking about 2012, or even 2010. I don't know that having Palin on a national ticket in 2012 would be wise or helpful. But I don't want her to go away entirely. For whatever she lacks, she brings energy to a party that it is sorely lacking. She has moves, as Melinda put it, and I don't think we should underestimate her.
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Despite all else—the good news, for instance, that South Dakotans rejected harsh restrictions on women's uteri, and Colorado laughed at the idea that a fertilized egg is a person—let me just add how deeply sad I am that in Proposition 8, California's 38 million people decided, 52 percent to 48 percent, that two women or two men should not have their marriages recognized by the law. In the last few weeks, when the polls got close, I was extremely worried. The much-discussed Bradley effect may not actually exist, but a "homo effect" does. When LGBT issues go up for a popular vote, that vote has usually run about four points more against us than pollsters predict. The (barely) good news is that the effect has shrunk: The result was only 2 percent worse than predicted. But a loss is still a loss.
There's lots to say, and maybe I will pull out of my sadness and say it another time. Important to remember that California is an enormous and complicated state, more populous than Canada, as diverse as the nation politically. For instance, it has the largest Mormon population outside Utah and a large evangelical megachurch base. Its vast poor and rural stretches have opinions that differ greatly from those of San Franciscan liberals. And so while some counties went overwhelmingly in favor of retaining same-sex marriage, the more conservative counties went overwhelmingly against. Men were against same-sex marriage while women were 50-50; younger people were (overwhelmingly) for same-sex marriage while older people were against.
I am sad even though I know that, in 20 years, that vote will go the other way—maybe even in 10. Much sooner than that, I believe, some other American state will join Massachusetts and Connecticut (and Belgium, Canada, the Netherlands, South Africa, Spain—and, as of last spring, Norway) in opening up the M-word to same-sex pairs. And I am sad even though this wasn't a total rejection of same-sex unions: California's domestic partnership law is the equivalent of Vermont's civil unions, as comprehensive a set of recognitions and protections as you can get, short of the M-word itself—and California voters have let that stand.
Still, it stings to be told that your ability to love is not worthy of the word marriage. You can commit yourself for life, raise children together, pray over your sick beloved's body in the ER, or have the same argument for years about whose relatives you visit on Thanksgiving, but get the state's recognition that it's a real marriage? Nope. It's painful.
Guess I'm staying in Massachusetts—where my neighbors are still overwhelmingly proud to be first—after all.
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It wasn't at the top of my mind, but I did wonder how the incumbent would respond last night—just as I've found myself wondering over the last two months what it could possibly feel like to be a sitting president whose eight years are now almost universally prefaced by the adjective "disastrous." Bush's opponents use it, and so do his supporters, and even if he never reads any newspapers—and seems barricaded out of sight these days—it's hard to believe he has been insulated from the devastating verdict.
Yet to carry on, I suppose he has to be, on some level, deaf to it and to the drama of a succession that is about, front and center, his own failure. Certainly his congratulatory message to Obama last night sounded singularly out of tune—and not just because it was a night on which the candidates themselves so eloquently captured the spirit of historic significance. "What an awesome night for you, your family, and your supporters. You are about to go on one of the great journeys of life. Congratulations and go enjoy yourself.'' From the adolescent "awesome" to the self-actualizing bromides to the flippant "go enjoy yourself" (what phrase did he really have mind?), the well-wishing was unsettlingly off-pitch. So off-pitch that I wonder if we could be hearing the deep bitterness of a man belatedly aware of how derailed his own journey has been.
But-how disorienting is this: We don't have to think about him anymore.
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Some small observations in the spirit of Melinda’s post on Elizabeth Dole: Marilyn Musgrave, R-Colo., is out. Virgil Goode, R-Va., looks to have lost in a squeaker. That last-ditch attack ad flopped. South Dakotans defeated Measure 11, which would have prohibited abortions except in absurdly limited cases and was meant as a test rocket to take down Roe v Wade.
Maybe we really can bend the arc of history.
My favorite part of Obama’s speech tonight was the guided tour through the amazing 106-year lifetime of Ann Nixon Cooper. It forced me to catch up with so many of you who were already seeing this election through the eyes of your children. It made me see that the world in which my sons will grow to adulthood will be unrecognizable to me. Just as Ann Nixon Cooper moved from a time before cars to voting on a touch screen, my kids are going to look back at the ways we have talked about race and gender and class and geography this year and laugh. Probably as they speed off on their X-wing starfighters. And the part I have yet to fully absorb? It's not just that, as Obama said tonight, “America can change.” It’s that my kids will wake up tomorrow morning in a fundamentally different world than the one they went to sleep in.
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And I have tears in my eyes, too, watching Barack Obama and Michelle and their two beautiful little girls walk out there in Grant Park. And I'm glad my own little girls spent this morning knocking on doors here in Virginia, helping to get out the vote.
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Hanna,
Thanks for your post on Sarah Palin. It's funny: I was at the polls today, doing my mundane but important civic duty, coloring in all the circles completely like a student taking a standardized test and reading the language of all the amendments and issues carefully to make sure a "yes" was a yes and a "no" was a no. But as I was going over my ballot (before feeding it into a box that looked mysteriously like a paper shredder), I paused on Sarah Palin's name right there under John McCain's, and just a bit of emotion welled up in me. There was a spring in my step as I walked back to my car. After all my doubts and confusion, I was excited and a little proud to be voting for her.
Believe me, I'm someone who abhorred the "PC tokenist ‘90s," and god knows that I would never vote for a woman just because of her gender. I don't know what tonight will bring, and I'm not overly optimistic. But I think that you're exactly right that she's bigger than some of her low moments and bigger than the wardrobe. Maybe even bigger than the campaign. If she and McCain lose tonight, she might take some hits for a while. But there will be a lot of blame to go around, and she won't get all of it. And, like Tina Fey's Sarah Palin said on Saturday Night Live in that QVC skit, "I'm not going anywhere." Speaking of which, where can I get one of those "Palin in 2012" T-shirts?
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Ah, the irony of the sexy librarian inquiring whether it's legal to ban books.
What I was initially getting at was less how Sarah Palin defines herself and more how our culture has responded to those definitions. For example, in all the McCain blame-game conversations that are emerging in the press today--like this one by Slate's Christopher Beam--there's a total absence of hand-wringing of the were we ready for a female VP? variety. Of course, had Palin been more prepared for the job, that conversation may be a different one: Her inexperience and incuriousity have been a great leveler.
I'm happy that the McCain flame-out discussion doesn't imply we wait another 24 years for a female candidate, as we have since Ferraro. Hanna suggests, and I agree, that Palin will gain mastery in the political game--at least as it plays out in mass culture if not in policy discussion. But the specter of a post-Palin America, as Hanna put it, with our most famous Alaskan annointed as the lone figure to be reckoned with? That strikes me as just the sort of future celebrity candidacy Obama unfairly had to shake. Normalizing the concept of women in our highest offices? It's about time. Normalizing Palin as the best shot at female leadership? Thanks but no thanks.
Perhaps before I get all worked up about 2012, I should get through tonight. But it's certainly intriguing to consider what this two-year campaign has laid out for the road ahead. Looking at the ballot in my polling booth this morning, I flashed back to the beginning of this relentless, seemingly endless trip. Back then I wouldn't have believed the choices we have had the opportunity to make today.
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Oh my gosh, how I love to vote! I stood in line for two hours this morning in a dense urban area right outside Boston waiting to vote. The lines were literally around the block and then another block back—hundreds of people, maybe more than 400 in line at a time. It's a bright, chilly day up here; when we turned the corner onto a windy street, my fingers went numb and didn't fully stop tingling until an hour after I'd voted. None of us had ever seen anything like it. Mine is a mixed-class, mixed-age neighborhood, and it sure did look like everyone in town was in line: white working-class (especially Portuguese and Italian, who used to be called "ethnics" only a generation ago), college students, parents (some brave souls with babies or toddlers in tow), elderly folks, and Certified Liberal Elites (professors, journalists, lawyers, doctors, scientists, and the like). I did get some use out of the time in line: The preschool teacher behind me gave me some suggestions for managing a child's tantrums—very useful, since I am spending more and more time with a 5-year-old. Then the 80-year-old woman in front of me insisted that I vote ahead of her since she didn't have to go to work and I did, so that cut a minute off my time. The cheerful line was still curled around the block when I left at 11 a.m., all happy at being part of democracy.
I suspect I wasn't the only one who felt especially virtuous because of the wait. Social science suggests that yes, in presidential elections, people vote as much for that feeling of moral virtue as for a sense of affecting the outcome—and that people tend to value something more highly or believe in it more firmly if they had to work harder to get it. Here in the Boston area, the sense of cheerfulness and friendliness in line could be linked to the probability that most people were voting for a candidate they believed would win—and felt that they were accompanied by those who agreed with them. Like Emily, I am giddy with relief that this 100-year campaign is almost over. But for today, whatever the outcome, I just love that feeling of having my say in hiring our commander in chief. Voting makes me especially love my country!!
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I was saddened this evening to read about the death of Obama's grandmother, Madelyn Dunham, or as anyone who has read Dreams From My Father might remember her, "Toot." Toot was an ordinary woman who raised an extraordinary family and who increasingly lived race in America in a way few have. Living in Texas after the war, Toot shooed her daughter and a black playmate inside the house when children screamed "nigger lover" outside her picket fence; in Hawaii, she opened her heart to an African son-in-law, when intermarriage was still illegal in more than half the country. As we all know, she went on to raise an African-American grandson who was to become the first black nominee for president of the United States. Toot became a symbol of race's emotional complexities—and a literal embodiment, some thought, of selling one's own grandmother for political gain—when, in his speech on race, Obama discussed her discomfort with black people who were not her grandson. She died on the eve of what may well be his election. Regardless of its outcome, I, for one, feel bereft that she will not get to see tomorrow.
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My beloved Liz Lemon—er, I mean Tina Fey—isn't the only one suggesting that Sarah Palin's focus has shifted from 2008 to 2012. Today, trying get a jump on the post-election story before the polls even open, much less close, a host of politicos are placing their bets over who will emerge from the broken GOP as the next to be (unofficially) crowned party leader.
When John McCain chose his running mate, he was rightfully lambasted as cynical for passing over experienced insider men for an accessible outsider woman. In the end, he was right on one count: that a swath of the American public—though one which perhaps may not be wide enough to elect him tomorrow—felt so disenfranchised by the people who hold power in this country that they would line up behind someone who reflected and could articulate their own proud feelings of ordinariness. (This profound cultural conflict—rooted deep in issues of education and economics—will require far more systemic thinking than the fuzzy feeling of "unity" Obama hopes to usher in tomorrow and beyond.) Where McCain may have been wrong—and this is big—was in his perception of this election as a game of identity politics.
People have talked plenty about whether Obama is a post-race candidate for a post-race America. I've generally taken issue with that notion—and should he be elected, my heart positively swells with the notion of the descendant of slaves raising her children inside the White House. But by the same flawed token, did Sarah Palin become a post-gender candidate for a post-gender America? Of course, Palin has certainly worked her gender in this race: from that flirty wink and sky-high Manolos to her uber-mom positioning. But like Obama's race hasn't been the totalizing meta-narrative of his candidacy, neither has Palin's gender, and just as this hasn't been an election year for single issue voters, it hasn't been one for single-identity ones either, despite what pundits may have predicted from the outset. We entered this race all aflutter about our first female presidential candidate. We're ending it considering the next one with hardly a shrug about her gender.
While I am hardly a Palin fan, and for myriad reasons shudder to imagine how she might develop with the next four years to study up, the fact that neither her supporters nor her detractors seemed to make a big deal about a female commander in chief (remember those days?) suggests that in unexpected ways, we've come a long way during this long march to Election Day.
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Excellent post, Melinda! Are you starting a contest to ferret out the scummiest campaign tactic? Because that could keep us busy from now until Tuesday, when we'll be sitting around twiddling our thumbs and waiting for the exit polls. I think your Elizabeth Dole ad wins because it's a national race, but I've got my own little submission for scummiest campaign claim, even though it's not an ad. (Hat tip to Joel Mowbray at Townhall.com.)
Josh Mandel is a young Republican (wow, I feel old) who won a spot in Ohio's General Assembly in 2006, representing a heavily Democratic district in Cleveland. He was a former Marine who had served in Iraq. In 2007, the Marines asked him to voluntarily re-enlist. As he puts it, "I didn't join the Marine Corps to say no when my country called." So he went, and he returned home in April of this year. Now, up for re-election, challenger Bob Belovich is questioning his dedication to his constituents, and Belovich's wife admits she told voters that Mandel went "AWOL." She also said at a Democratic event that "Josh Mandel isn't serving our country; he's serving George Bush."
And this YouTube video features an audio clip of Belovich, best I can tell, accusing Mandel in his first campaign of trying to hide his party affiliation and capitalize on his "Jewish" name.
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I'm a pregnancy cliché, much of the time. Weepy one moment (hello, Obama-mercial), enraged the next (did you forget to buy milk!?). Most of the time I can ignore the emotional lability or laugh about it. But sometimes that righteous ire is for good reason. The obscene amount of unsolicited advice one receives, for example—all aimed at some kind of collective fetus care that totally eclipses the rights of an individual. (The other day a complete stranger reminded me I shouldn't take "hot baths" lest I hurt my child. Thank you!) But much more importantly: the legistlative means states have taken to ensure fetal rights.
Last night I received a new short video produced by the National Advocates for Pregnant Women that narrates the full impact the various fetal rights initiatives on ballots next week will have if they pass (it's six minutes but it's at minute one that the really intense bits creep in, after the pitch to vote "no"). Colorado has Prop 48, a definition of personhood amendment (McCain has come out in favor of it), which would define life—and, most importantly, human rights—as beginning at the moment of conception. South Dakota has measure 11, mostly banning abortion. Normally these measures are seen as simply means of chipping away at abortion rights, and it's true that's part of their intended impact. In the video Lynn Paltrow, executive director at the NAPW, explains how these amendments end up compromising the bodily integrity of all pregnant women.
NAPW is part of a grassroots movement of women from both sides of the abortion debate who are arguing for the rights of pregnant women not to be ignored or overtaken by fetal rights—something that sounds inherently intuitive but is, in many states, painfully most definitely not. In a letter to the editor of the New York Times two weeks ago, Paltrow explained that "Such measures are used to control, and sometimes punish, women who do not want unnecessary Caesarean surgery; who want to have vaginal births after previous Caesarean surgery; women who love their children but can't necessarily overcome a drug or alcohol problem in the short term of a pregnancy; and women who suffer unintentional stillbirths."
In the video, vignettes give anecdotes about the consequences of these legislative interventions: like the case of Amber Marlowe who, in 2004, discovered Pennsylvania had the right to represent the right of her fetus when her hospital, determining the baby would be too large to deliver vaginally, got a court injunction that superseded Amber's rights for the child, forcing legal, surgical intervention. Amber fled the scene and delivered without complication elsewhere. Laura Pemberton, in Florida, was arrested, put in handcuffs, and forced to have a ceasearan. Both women consider themselves pro-life and both were caught in the peculiar dragnet of fetal rights.
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Not surprisingly, I had a different take on Elaine Lafferty's column in the Daily Beast. That's not to argue with Sarah or Emily or Ann, it's just that I was looking for something different. But before I get to that, what strikes me as interesting is the treatment that Lafferty is getting from some on the left. Didn't many on the left just hold up Christopher Buckley as a hero for his speaking "truth to power" in HIS Daily Beast column where he came out for Obama? And wasn't everyone horrified by the name-calling he got on the right? I was. So how is it different when Jezebel tells Lafferty to go perform an anatomically impossible task? Neither of our two major parties is perfect, and when prominent figures use their influence to criticize their parties and say "Hey, you're not listening to me," it should serve as a wake-up call. It should prompt debate and soul-searching that would make the party stronger.
But, as for my take own on Lafferty: I was amused that she was mock-horrified to be agreeing with Fred Barnes because I had just read Barnes' own Palin-is-smart column in the Weekly Standard. I've been torn up about Palin. My initial reaction was one of extreme enthusiasm, which quickly became tempered by a serious case of longing for Mitt Romney as veep when she bombed her big media interviews, which in turn became relief when she did so well in the debate with Joe Biden. Also, my concerns over her lack of experience did battle with my excitement that there was a strong, dynamic conservative woman putting herself out there and going for the brass ring. It worried me when conservative intellectuals started breaking ranks, but I couldn't help remember seeing all the women at a Palin rally I covered and how excited they were. And, no, they weren't all the bible-beating, evangelical, social conservatives that she's supposed to get so worked up. There was a young, kinda hippie-ish couple with three little girls in pink Palin T-shirts, middle-aged women with teenage daughters, women in business suits, and moms in track suits.
So when I see positive reaction from people who would not normally be inclined to like her, I'm grateful. And frankly, if Sarah Palin is as smart as the people who get to know her say, it's something we should all be happy about. Unless women want to have yet another skirmish over who gets to call themselves a feminist and fight over whether abortion is a litmus test, it's a positive that there are smart, powerful women on both sides of our great ideological divide, fighting for what they believe in and setting examples for the women in their parties.
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So, Barack Obama has raised $605 million (including money from sources whose "names" look as if they were plucked from ACORN's voter registrations lists), reneged on his pledge to take matching federal funds along with John McCain, and is spending almost $2 million on a half-hour ad to air on the networks next Sunday, and I'm supposed to think he's a man of the people because he gets his shoes resoled? Sorry, I'm not buying it.
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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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Rosa,
I'm glad we can agree on something! I, too, feel sorry for Joe. The way the media has responded to him today has been appalling. For a time, the lead story on NYTimes.com was "Joe the Plumber is under scrutiny, " even highlighting ominously that "his full name is Samuel J. Wurzelbacher." It's not exactly uncommon for people to go by their middle names. MSNBC.com's lead story right now digs into Wurzelbacher's background (even citing his DIVORCE RECORDS), saying that the plumber he works for might be fined because Joe doesn't have proper licensing. And, horrors, the business might take in only $100,000, not $250,000, and that's revenue, not profits. But who knows? Earlier media reports I've seen have been riddled with errors, saying that Joe already owns the business or runs the business, or that Wurzelbacher said he wouldn't be able to BUY the business if Obama's tax plan kicked in. I might have misheard Wurzelbacher in the original video, but I don't remember him saying that.
Forgive me for sounding like a knee-jerk reactionary, but how can people look at the scrutiny Wurzelbacher has received in the last 24 hours and not think there is some kind of bias at play? John McCain cites a regular old American in his debate-something that can annoy me when it's a sob story about how the government has failed someone—and people cheer for the guy, identify with the guy, and so he has to be taken down? Obama has a pretty comfortable lead in the polls right now. He can't possibly be afraid of Joe the Plumber. I don't get the media feeding frenzy.
I might feel bad for Joe, but I'm not worried about him. (And I think you might be disappointed if you expect him to blame the attention on McCain.) He's got a good perspective on it all. "I'll have my 15 minutes," he told MSNBC. After Nov. 4, "I won't be recognized again, and that'll be fine with me." I just wish the media had the same good common sense.