during Wednesday's presidential debate was to understand the Republican party's attitude toward blue-collar Americans: superficially affectionate, at times even idolatrous, but fundamentally patronizing and contemptuous. As a working stiff who aspired to clamber into the ranks of the proprietor class, Joe the Plumber was a perfect Republican prop. He was the human equivalent of the hardhat the candidate might have worn on a visit to a factory, assuming he could find a factory that was still operating.
McCain and his spokesmen couldn't say the name enough, even after it emerged that Joe or Sam didn't have a plumber's license and had a tax lien standing against him. In this Joe is also representative of the Republican party: an unqualified person impersonating a competent professional. He belongs to the same category as a flack for a horse-breeders' association who impersonates an expert at disaster-management
and a draft-dodging oilman turned sports entrepreneur who impersonates a war president.
Except that even without a license Joe the Plumber is probably better at his job than Mike the FEMA director or George the POTUS were at theirs.
Along with just saying Joe the Plumber's name, McCain likes repeating his objection to Barack Obama's tax plans, and especially to Obama's desire to "share" or "spread" the wealth. "Barack Obama wants you to 'share the wealth'", he tells cheering rallies. "I want to create wealth!" It's the candidate as slot machine.
Of course, in Republican ideology, the true creator of wealth is not government: It's business. Still, the salient idea is of wealth as something created, as if from nothing, through the alchemical marriage of executives and shareholders.
The business's workers have been PhotoShopped out of the picture. The idea of work, of effort, has been PhotoShopped out. But of course workers can't be dispensed with entirely-- even the wealth created by Bear Sterns and Wachovia, by Lehman Brothers and AIG, wealth that dissolved like dry ice, required some kind of workers.
And so Joe the Plumber is brought forth as a place-holder for the ones who have been PhotoShopped out of the picture. He's a worker who dreams of becoming one of the owners, and that makes him a convenient mascot to a party that historically has viewed workers, and particularly workers' rights, more or less the same way the States Rights Party viewed African-Americans.
If Joe had just wanted a higher wage, or a health plan, it would have been a different story. Then he could have been a Democratic mascot.
Going back to spreading the wealth. The idea, if not the precise phrase, was a standard part of liberal small-D democratic governance for more than 40 years, embraced by both big-D Democratic and Republican administrations. It's the idea that the wealth of the nation belongs in some measure to all its citizens, and that part of government's job is to move it around. It's the idea behind public works projects and public schools and hospitals and the armed forces, things that all of us pay for and that are supposed to serve all of us.
Of course nobody likes to feel beholden. Ronald Reagan came into office by vigorously denying the notion that there was such a thing as national wealth. All wealth belonged to individuals (though many of those individuals were actually corporations), and any attempt by government to redistribute it was tantamount to theft. The claim satisfied the universal desire to hold onto one's money. It satisfied the peculiarly American desire to feel that one is the sole author of one's fortune.
Under Reagan and Bush 1 and, yes, Clinton, and finally the current president, the idea metastasized, giving us an energy policy dictated by oil companies, an EPA run for the benefit of polluters, a great city abandoned to storm and flood, disintegrating bridges, and at last the mass looting of millions of mortgage holders and small investors, by lenders and investment banks that had once been subject to government supervision until people like McCain and Phil Gramm succeeded in freeing them to create more wealth.
One of the reasons why so many American institutions are now in ruins is because government abandoned the job of distributing wealth. Actually, many of its actions during the past 30 years helped concentrate wealth.
That's why the inequality between the richest one percent and the poorest 20 percent is greater than at any time since the 1920s.
And if we really reject the idea of spreading the wealth, we may as well stop building highways when they get to the poor parts of town and let our enemies know that if they just drop their bombs on Detroit and Akron, we won't lay a finger on them.
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