Samuel Wurzelbacher died on Aug. 27. nnYou probably know him as “Joe the Plumber,” the willing prop of 2008 presidential candidate John McCain trotted out from time to time to drum up support against presidential candidate Barack Obama.
Wurzelbacher was the Everyman, the forgotten blue-collar voter and small-business owner lost in the national conversation, the one who came on the campaign trail to convince Americans that it was the GOP, not Democrats, who understood the plight of the everyday Joe embodied by this Joe.
Nomenclature wasn’t the problem, but it was a good place to start.
Thomas Joseph, a business manager of Local 50 of the United Association of Plumbers, Steamfitters and Service Mechanics, based in Toledo, said at the time that Wurzelbacher had never held a plumber's license, had never completed an apprenticeship, and had never belonged to the plumbers' union that had endorsed Obama.
So a guy who really wasn’t named Joe and who really wasn’t a plumber was brought on by the Straight Talk Express to impersonate one. The campaign thought so little of its base, it didn’t think the base would notice that it was being duped.
And the campaign was right — the base didn’t.
Wurzelbacher’s original 10 minutes of fame occurred months before, though, when he confronted Obama at a campaign stop. Obama was explaining his proposed tax policy and how it would affect small-business owners, and Wurzelbacher, who wasn’t one of those either, took offense to it.
“I’m getting ready to buy a company that makes 250 to 280 thousand dollars a year,” Wurzelbacher told the future president at the time. “Your new tax plan’s going to tax me more, isn’t it?” As part of a lengthy response, Obama said, “It’s not that I want to punish your success. I just want to make sure that everybody who is behind you, that they’ve got a chance at success too.”
There’s simply no record that Wurzelbacher was planning to buy any such company.
After the election, in 2012, Wurzelbacher became a motivational speaker — I’m clearly in the wrong business — and then ran for Congress in Ohio before losing to Marcy Kaptur, a Democrat. He bounced around conservative media for years until Republicans stopped even pretending they cared about people like those he was pretending to be.
It was in 2014, though, when he channeled and embodied the entire Republican Party on gun control in America, the reverberations of which you can still feel today.
"I am sorry you lost your child. I myself have a son and daughter and the one thing I never want to go through is what you are going through now. But, as harsh as this sounds — your dead kids don’t trump my Constitutional rights.”
That’s what he wrote in a letter to the parents of the victims murdered by Elliot Rodger, who shot to death seven people and injured more than 22 others in Isla Vista, California, in May of that year before killing himself. This non-plumber, this political fraud, the non-Everyman Joe thought it was necessary to school the parents of dead children on his scholarship of the Constitution.
And unlike the campaign stunts of which he was a part, which you can more or less understand, this latest act was ugly, unforgivable, and unconscionable.
As Vito Corleone told Don Barzini at the meeting of the heads of the Five Families, “And that I do not forgive.”
Wurzelbacher died of pancreatic cancer. He was 49.
According to MD Anderson Cancer Center, compared to other cancers, pancreatic cancer is relatively rare; however, it is the third-leading cause of cancer death in the United States. Sadly, only about 8.5% of patients with pancreatic cancer are alive five years after their first diagnosis, the lowest survival rate of any kind of cancer.
How bad is it?
In 2023, the American Cancer Society projects more than 50 thousand will die from pancreatic cancer — about as many as will die from firearms.
My rabbi used to tell me the best reason to be good in life is so others don’t have to lie about you after you died.
So, let's end with this:
As harsh as this sounds, pancreatic cancer is a death sentence. It’s unpreventable, unlike death caused by having too many guns in the hands of too many people who shouldn’t have them. But I would never want to go through what the Wurzelbacher family is going through right now. I myself have a pancreas.
Barry Friedman is an essayist, political columnist, petroleum geology reporter — quit laughing — and comedian living in Tulsa, Okla. His latest book, “Jack Sh*t: Volume One: Voluptuous Bagels and other Concerns of Jack Friedman” has just been released. In addition, he is the author of “Road Comic,” “Funny You Should Mention It,” “Four Days and a Year Later,” “The Joke Was On Me,” and a novel, “Jacob Fishman’s Marriages.” See barrysfriedman.com and friedmanoftheplains. com.
From The Progressive Populist, October 1, 2023
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