Joe

Posted on | October 16, 2008 | 1 Comment

Joe is my favourite text editor, it will be really hard for me to work without it.

Joe has been on the news a lot since yesterday. ‘Joe the plumber’, that is. He became an overnight star after the final debate between the presidential candidates last night. His real name is Joe Wurzelbacher, a 34 year old plumber from Holland, Ohio. He was about to buy a company that makes more than $250,000 a year, and he was afraid that under Obama’s leadership, he might have to pay higher corporate taxes.

Katie Couric had a chat with Joe yesterday, the detail of the conversation is available here. I heard excerpts of conversation this morning from KCBS as I drove to work. He was a good sport, saying that he was glad to contribute, but also bringing back focus on the debate itself.

One bit of a shock was his sentence about Obama changing his mind on offshore drilling. To my knowledge, Obama was always pro offshore drilling, it was at least clearly mentioned in the first debate. However Obama always brings up the fact that we only have 3% of world’s oil, while we consume 25% of it. Here is the Fact Check report. I don’t know if Joe was misled by McCain’s negative campaigns.

I am a bit curious about the negative ads, both from Obama and from McCain. I don’t know how severe they are. All we know is that they spend about the same on negative ads. McCain’s negative add ratio is about two-thirds, while Obama’s is about one-third. However, Obama just air more ads, so it works out to be about equal. Again, here is my backing. My wife pointed out that we in California do not get wide exposures on these ads since both candidates spend their money elsewhere.

Anyway, I know that we are always polarized. And instinctively we filter out facts that we don’t want to hear. This is not just Joe the plumber, but myself including.

Here is a funny exchanges from this morning campaigns:

Palin said something like: “We do not want to raise taxes for Joe and Jane the plumbers, unlike the other Joe, who I am running against.

… Biden that is.

Now that other Joe said something like: “It is absolutely crazy to cut taxes to the most wealthy of the country. We should give that tax break to the Joe the plumber”

‘Joe’ is now a moniker. Congratulations, Joe!!