Joe The Plumber Does Not Impress New Jersey
‘Joe the Plumber’ flops in New Jersey; McCain’s “Harry and Louise” moment fails to materialize.
Though “Joe the Plumber” may have a book deal and perhaps a future in politics, the reaction in New Jersey suggests the bald-headed everyman’s entry in campaign 2008 was more a flop than the “Harry and Louise” moment the McCain camp was waiting for.
For starters, Joe failed to impress Rocky the Cigar Guy.
“That’s just for politicians, it’s all politics,” said Rocky Cody, a partner in Hoboken Cigars, a cigar lounge near Hoboken’s PATH train station where photos of Robert Menendez and other Jersey notables grace the walls. Lest it be thought that Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher, a.k.a. Joe the Plumber, might strike a chord among small business with his strident antitax message and praise for the entrepreneurial, Cody wasn’t having it.
“Here in New Jersey our mayors are getting locked up, our politicians are crooked – we’ve seen it all,” Cody said. The economy is a high priority here: Cody says cigar sales are noticeably down in this turbulent economic climate. And yet Joe isn’t the answer.
He’s not alone. The Republican party’s New Jersey polling numbers are actually consistent with the idea that Joe the Plumber’s rise hurt rather than helped GOP prospects in the Garden State. Failure in a high-tax, high-income state like New Jersey probably means even more elsewhere.
When the Toledo, Ohio native Wurzelbacher burst into Election 2008 on Oct. 11 prompting Barack Obama’s “Spread the wealth” promise, John McCain had polled as close behind as 50-42 in one Rasmussen poll. But by the last week of October, McCain had plummeted into the 30s while his Democratic rival continued to surge. A state that some pollsters this summer predicted could be close now exhibited landslide numbers.
“The fact is that there are lots of people who feel they are like Joe the Plumber, but, at least in New Jersey, these folks seem to have come to a very different conclusion as to who the next president should be,” said to Ben Dworkin, director of the Directory, Rebovich Institute for New Jersey Politics at Rider University in Lawrenceville, N.J.
That judgment is not one the McCain campaign shared, at least through the crucial final three weeks of October. John McCain referenced “Joe the Plumber” repeatedly as he delivered stump speeches – a sign that the candidate and his advisers thought the message would resonate.
In previous cycles, homestyle figures who tap into economic anxieties have been a mainstay of negative political advertising. The early 1990s health-insurance industry-backed “Harry and Louise” ads attacking Bill Clinton’s health plans are the archetype: Two kindly elders who worry what the powers in Washington will do to wreck their health care.
But it appears Joe has not taken a prominent place among those figures.
“Like voters across the country, New Jersey’s voters were motivated by the bad economy. Had it been doing well, Bush would be getting the credit and it would be a good year to be a Republican like John McCain. But it wasn’t, so things have been tough for the GOP all over the state,” Dworkin said.
Not every Jersey resident thinks “Joe the Plumber” sprung a leak. Patsy Noto of Manchester, N.J., president of the Sergeants Benevolent Association, which has endorsed John McCain, and himself a self-described McCain supporter, called Joe “a saint and a hero.”
“This guy asked a simple question the media should have asked a long time ago,” Noto said. “For that he’s been vilified, the government has investigated his tax records and even ransacked the DMV for his license information. Give me a break.”