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Why McCain's story of Joe the Plumber backfired

Ellis Henican

October 19, 2008

It's a narrative device as old as campfire stories: When you want to impart a general concept, find a way to tell it through one person's experience.

This approach works well in fiction, as everyone from Shakespeare to Mark Twain to Tom Wolfe can attest. The one-human-story technique even makes for fine newspaper columns, where brevity and instant identification are everything.

But politicians almost never have the literary gifts to pull it off. They lose the thread of the story. They botch the basic facts. From Hillary's hardworking diner waitresses to John McCain's new best friend, these stories almost all come off as hokey, even when the people themselves try to cooperate.

We're already two-thirds of the way down the arc of Joe the Plumber.

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At his first introduction, he sounded like a gift from the underdog gods to the McCain campaign - a plain-spoken, telegenic small-business man about to be crushed by Barack Obama's tax plan. So of course McCain would mention him 479 times during the Hofstra debate.

But Joe kept talking. And he talked some more. Before he was done, the whole world knew:

Joe doesn't have a plumber's license (his employer has one, so he can work as a plumber). No one really calls him Joe. He owes back taxes. He has no plan to buy the business he said he was buying. It grosses less than half of what he claimed it does. And the boss hadn't agreed to sell.

Plus, the whole idea that Joe was an undecided middle-minded voter? That got harder to sustain once he started calling Obama a socialist and explaining how evil he thought Social Security was.

Uh, that's enough, Joe. Or Sam. Or whatever your name is. Thank you very much for participating here.

You see? That's often the problem with telling complex stories through one person's experience.

The person might not be what the story calls for. Even worse, the person might have something else to say.

PREMIUM PRICE: That's a lot of money: $900 million in insurance-premium overcharges by the State Health Insurance Program - $500 million to the state, $36 million to Nassau County and $375 million to various school districts, towns and villages, many on LI. Said Nassau Comptroller Howard Weitzman, whose office blew the whistle on the long-running scam: "The insurance companies are ripping us off." Big time!

NEW BEAT: As the sweaty post-debate crowd gyrated to "Walk This Way," hardly anyone at GLO Nightclub in Westbury realized that the 31-year-old DJ, Lindsay Lohan squeeze Samantha Ronson, wasn't even born yet (by two years) when the original Aerosmith version came out. She couldn't even drink (legally) when Run-D.M.C's dropped. Rock on.

CAPPU-WITHDRAWAL: Life's tense already at the Mineola criminal courthouse. It won't get any less so once Starbucks closes across Old Country Road, leaving the lawyers, judges and defendants suddenly caffeine-deprived. So what's the good news? A barista-based business opportunity for some nice ex-criminal looking to go straight again. Rehabilitation, anyone?

ASKED AND UNANSWERED: Don't you hate it when you forget to take your pipe bomb out of your carry-on luggage? ... Shouldn't Ringo be happy ANYONE still wants his autograph? ... Is Joe Sixpack feeling jealous now of Joe the Plumber? And how do Joe College, Joe Blow, Joe Cool, Average Joe and Cuppa Joe feel about the new Joe stealing all their airtime? ... Best of three debates - how much credit does Hofstra get? Some, right? ... And now a sex tape? Is there anything else Christie Brinkley ex Peter Cook can do to soil his reputation? ... "Operation Dirty Feet" against pill-stealing Woodmere podiatrist Arthur Minkoff - are LI law enforcement agencies having a secret competition to dream up the snappiest operation names? ... Now that the New York City Council has jumped on computer visionary Paul Garrin's idea for a ".nyc" top-level Internet domain, anyone on Long Island ready for an e-mail address ending in .li? ... Am I the only person - too weak a stomach - who simply could not focus on that Nixzmary child-abuse trial? I hear there was a verdict ... Has anyone bothered to congratulate the parents, students and staff of The Wheatley School in Old Westbury for not flipping out over the new viral meningitis case? If not, congratulants for being cautious, not hysterical ... You think maybe James T. Wells is having some separation issues? Cops in Hempstead say he broke into his old girlfriend's house, trashed her cell phone, threw her to the ground and menaced her new boyfriend with a knife ... Nothing could be more tragic than a car crash that kills two 17-year-olds and leaves their West Hempstead classmate in a wheelchair. But is the criminal justice system really the place to seek amends from young driver Herbert B. Martinez? ... Are the kiosks in the Sunrise Mall becoming Canal Street East? The bust of alleged knockoff handbag man Rajesh Kapoor raises the question.

E-mail ellis@henican.com.

Not quite what they seem

1 Biden's proletarianism

2 Palin's runway winks

3 McCain's 11th-hour jocularity

4 Obama's landslide

5 The voters' intelligence