Say it ain't Rhetorical, Joe!

There has been much ado about a character named Joe the Plumber in the past few days, ever since he appeared on the national stage as a verbal cudgel in the hand of John McCain. This is an interesting phenomenon to me, not that an ordinary dude apparently got dragged into the political mud pit, but that this fictional character actually simultaneously exists as a real person named Samuel J. Wurzelbacher.

Do I actually mean that he is known by an alias? No. Mr. Wurzelbacher is a guy that works for a company that ostensibly installs plumbing in Ohio, that happened to ask Barack Obama a question in an exchange that was recorded and posted on You Tube. Joe the Plumber is some guy that can't buy a business because it profits just enough to be exempt from Mr. Obama's proposed tax cuts, and so is being denied living the American Dream. It is the fictional character that is being primarily featured in the news, but I wish to quarrel not with the spinners of this mysterious yarn but those that are desperately trying to unravel it.

There has been a flurry of activity in the news media (I primarily read the NYT and WashingtonPost) about the discrepancies between the fiction and the man. Mr. W. is not and has never been a plumber, in so far as he never apprenticed or was admitted into the trade union of plumbers. He works for a company not licensed to plumb, or to build stuff in Toledo, where it is based. Finally, it turns out, no one can demonstrate how much the company makes or is worth. How do we know this? The plumber's union in Ohio revealed his non-plumberdom (they endorse Obama), and the Times has scoured public records and tried to get people to talk on the record. In the most irritating part of their inquiry, they point out that since he claimed that the company would make just over $250K that it would probably be exempt from tax hiking. So, see, there is no story because we've addressed every talking point about Joe the Plumber. Right?

Wrong.

The media, and unfortunately, Democrats, have adopted the Republican tactic of disintegrating the messenger instead of addressing the issue. "Look, he actually would have gotten a tax cut, so it doesn't count!" Nonsense. What if the business was worth $350,ooo? What if he was an actual licensed plumber (and was allowed to publicly split with his union without reprisal)? Disqualifying this guy's point of view piece by piece may seem like a good debating strategy, but it actually is an infuriating way to avoid addressing the substance of a legitimate criticism of a publicly espoused policy. Furthermore, deconstructing the fiction of Joe the Plumber back into Mr. W. somehow feignedly implies that the analyst doing the deconstruction actually believed in the first place that McCain was trying to be strictly factual and not relating a synthetic anecdote for rhetorical purposes.

So, let me translate a little. Let us imagine that a Democratic Senator poses, rhetorically, as the Devil's Advocate, that there will be people that want to purchase businesses that are just over the line into tax hike land, and so will not be able to afford the purchase. Or if they do, they will hire less people or suffer some other drawback as the result of the policy. Seems legit, right? What is the response? That this is impossible? Hardly. How about "the tax code is graded, so there is no sudden application of any increase or decrease." Better. How about, "you are already successful, so we're helping other guys." This one was tried and called class warfare. Finally, I can imagine some version of, "Well, we're taking those taxes and making health insurance cheaper so you will actually come out ahead, especially if you hire lots of folks." To be clear, Mr. W. did say, in an interview in his driveway, that he was concerned that someone somewhere would be negatively affected by increasing taxes. That was his point, that is the position of the friendly Devil's Advocate above. No one cared to answer it. Attacking the messenger does not diminish the message, only the interpretation of the message. This is a tactic employed by people that don't want others to interpret the message however seems fit to themselves.

Now, I'd like to pose some questions. Is his point, that he might be unable to afford to buy a plumbing business because of tax hiking invalid, because he is not actually a plumber? What if he was a stinking toothless bum claiming to be a plumber? Is a question about educational reform invalid if the person asking it claims to be a teacher and is not? What if they made no claim as to their qualifications, is the question less apt? The question is the question, and the claimed qualification of the asker is largely irrelevant, as questions carry no weight of authority or veracity. I'm disappointed that the HighRoad People stooped to this tactic.

The reason they stooped was not, I believe, because they were afraid of the message. It is that they were combating the connection of the public with the poor underdog guy that is trying to make ends meet. This big sob story is a fiction, and so it isn't fair to expect millions of people to print T-shirts claiming that he could be employing plumbers right now. Attacking the fictional character's link to the flesh-and-blood guy deflates the esprit de corps that is making working class tools rally to his cause, and that is the reason Democrats and the media are exposing the discrepancies. Nevertheless, people that are not duped by invented characters and their tribulations lose, since we are denied the analysis of the underlying criticism.

By the way, it is actually a big deal to claim to be a plumber and not be one. Finishing an apprenticeship is like earning an accredited degree, and practicing in the union is like being hired contingent on earning a degree. If an engineer was hired, and it was found out they lied and never finished school, they would be fired in an instant. They would be disgraced. This guy, apparently, claimed to have these credentials on his Facebook page. So, I'd say this is his reward, even if those providing it had other reasons for their actions, and even if those reasons were lame.

I can't believe that I rhetorically posed a hypothetical rhetorical question.