ANALYSIS: Say it ain't so Joe, and John McCain

Never mind that most of what Joe said ain't so. Joe the Plumber is a symbol now, the poster guy for John McCain's tax offensive against Barack Obama, even if the case is founded on fiction.

What ain't so about Joe is most of what McCain said about him in the final campaign debate. He is not really getting ready to buy a plumbing company, although he'd like to someday. He would not be subject to the tax increase Obama proposes for people making more than $250,000 a year. Indeed, he has said since the debate that the Obama plan probably would cut his taxes.

Political campaigns always are looking for case studies, average Americans they can point to as examples of what people would face under their policies or their opponent's. It's a gimmick, and in this case, a catchy one. Republicans are waving household plungers and chanting "Joe" at McCain and Sarah Palin rallies. You can buy "Joe the Plumber" T-shirts. The McCain campaign has a Joe the Plumber Internet link to the Republican candidate's economic proposals. Obama has one too. Click it and you get a calculator set up to figure your taxes under the Obama plan.

All this fuss is about Samuel J. Wurzelbacher of Holland, Ohio, who questioned Obama about his tax plan at an Oct. 11 campaign stop, saying, "I'm getting ready to buy a company that makes $250,000 to $280,000 a year. Your new tax plan is going to tax me more, isn't it?"

After the debate in which McCain talked about him, Wurzelbacher said he didn't get a clear answer from Obama that day but, rather, a tap dance worthy of Sammy Davis Jr.

McCain regularly invokes Joe's name and calls him the big winner of the Oct. 15 debate. It might not feel that way to Joe. His sudden celebrity has led to the disclosure that he does not have a plumber's license - he said he didn't need one but his county requires it - and that he owes $1,182.98 in back taxes to Ohio.

That's his business, as is his bent version of his business and federal tax prospects. But the personal becomes a spectator event when a presidential nominee makes an average guy into a campaign figure. Apparently nobody in the McCain operation thoroughly checked him out. They saw the exchange with Obama on the Internet and made Joe a talking point in the debate.

Since facts are relegated to fine print in a campaign in which each side regularly accuses the other of lying, the details about Joe the Plumber don't make any difference as Republicans retell the story. To say, as Democratic vice presidential nominee Joe Biden did, that the police officers, grocers and plumbers in his neighborhood aren't making $250,000 a year is, in the words of a McCain spokesman, an attempt to bully Joe the Plumber. Never mind that it is true that those kind of jobs don't pay that kind of money.

McCain says that Wurzelbacher is under "political attack," with people digging through his personal life just because he asked a tough question of Obama. But Joe didn't wind up in the middle because he asked a question. McCain put him there by using his name and tale some 20 times in the debate with Obama, who finally started addressing Joe too.

While Wurzelbacher said at first that his sudden fame was "kind of neat," now he's irked at intrusions on his personal affairs. That's understandable. He didn't choose to become a public figure. But he is choosing to play the hand, appearing on television shows and passing up a McCain rally in Toledo, near his home, in favor of TV interviews in New York.

In his three presidential campaigns, Ronald Reagan looked for real life examples, too. His sources and claims tended to be shaky, but it worked. His most noted claim was about "the welfare queen of Chicago," the woman he said bilked the government out of more than $150,000 by collecting welfare using 12 Social Security numbers and multiple aliases.

He didn't say who she was, just that he'd read about her. It turned out there was a woman who had been convicted for using two aliases to get $8,000 in benefits.

As president, Reagan raised the case study to a new level by honoring average Americans for notable service at his State of the Union addresses. He began that custom in 1982 by saluting Lenny Skutnick, a government worker who plunged into the icy Potomac River to rescue a woman after an airliner crash.

After that, when Reagan's people were seeking citizens to exemplify service, they said they were looking for Skutnicks.

Campaigning in 2000, George W. Bush called on preselected people in his crowds as examples of how much taxpayers would save with the cuts he advocated. It became a set piece. He'd call up a "tax family" and say to the dollar how much their tax bill would be cut under his plan. With Al Gore's tax proposals, Bush would say, they'd save "not one dime." It wasn't so, but it was a sure applause line.

And the tax families were a sure thing, chosen by the Bush campaign, their earnings and deductions checked and calculated to make sure they'd benefit. That took careful screening because the tax cut numbers didn't work out for families with newborns, day care, college or significant medical expenses.

Bush and Gore argued about tax cuts for the middle class versus rates for the upper brackets. Republicans said Gore was promoting class warfare by opposing cuts for the wealthiest Americans.

That sounds familiar because eight years later, McCain and Obama are debating the same thing.

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EDITOR'S NOTE - Walter R. Mears has reported on national politics for The Associated Press since 1960.