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Feeling Plumber Fatigue, Media Turn on 'Joe'
Like Sarah Palin, it didn't take long for "Joe the Plumber" to go from political sensation to political target.

FOXNews.com
Friday, October 17, 2008


Joe Wurzelbacher is followed by reporters in Holland, Ohio, on Thursday. (AP Photo)


Two nights ago, "Joe the Plumber" was a symbol of the American dream. By Friday morning, you would have thought he was convicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff.

Did you know he owes back taxes? Or that he's not actually a licensed plumber? And his first name's not even really Joe, but Samuel?

The "shocking" revelations spurred a litany of plumber putdowns in newspapers and liberal blogs across the country.

"Looks like there's a crack in Joe the Plumber's story," Democratic activist Bob Mulholland told the San Francisco Chronicle in a story that topped their Web site Friday morning.

"Joe the Plumber's story sprang a few leaks," The Associated Press reported.

But does it really matter?

No, Samuel "Joe" Wurzelbacher doesn't have a plumbing license, but his employer does. His back taxes total less than $1,200. Not exactly Wesley Snipes.  

Watch Mike Huckabee interview Wurzelbacher on FOX News Channel Saturday at 8 p.m. ET. The show will be rebroadcast at 8 p.m. and 11 p.m. ET Sunday.

John McCain's campaign argues that Joe the Plumber is still as relevant today as he ever was (meaning, two days ago), and wishes the media would stop hating on him.

"The same thing happened with Governor Palin," McCain spokesman Tucker Bounds told FOX News. "She was a threat to Barack Obama, and Barack Obama's campaign and his allies in the media attacked her background, attacked her standing -- just like they're doing with an everyday average voter that asked Barack Obama a question."

Wurzelbacher was catapulted into the most instant and unexpected kind of stardom after he asked Obama some critical questions about his tax policy in Ohio over the weekend. The video, which included Obama's response -- and now a Republican rallying cry -- that he wants to "spread the wealth around," went viral. McCain took up the cause of Joe at the final presidential debate.

The two candidates invoked his name more than two-dozen times, while Joe himself watched in shock.

"We've really gotta hand it to Joe," Sarah Palin said at a rally in Ohio Friday. "Somehow he got Barack Obama to finally state his intentions in plain language."

But as is the case with many celebrities -- and Wurzelbacher cheekily said he feared becoming another Britney Spears -- his story and relevance was at first heralded, then scrutinized, then neutralized, only on a remarkably accelerated timeline.

The opposition research to Joe (it's uncertain when being a voter turned one into the opposition) seemed to begin instantly. Allegations on the Internet range from claims that he is not a registered voter to suspicions that he was a Republican plant to rumors that he's related to notorious banker Charles Keating, namesake of the Keating Five scandal that embroiled McCain in the 1980s.

And hats off to the Toledo Blade for digging up his divorce records to find he made $40,000 in 2006, nothing near the $250,000 he hoped to make by one day buying his boss' company and possibly becoming susceptible to Obama's proposed tax increases.

Daily Kos called him a "right wing loon." A blog on The Huffington Post pondered him carrying the mantle of the "Angry White Man." At least one Web site used the term "Plumbergate."

FOX News contributor Howard Wolfson, former Hillary Clinton spokesman, had at it when Joe the Plumber was broached as a topic on air Friday morning.

"He's not a plumber, his name's not Joe and he would actually get a tax cut under Barack Obama," he said. "What it says is that John McCain's campaign didn't vet Joe the Plumber."

The Ohio press later reported that Wurzelbacher does appear to be registered to vote -- as a Republican. And the Daily Kos even corrected The Huffington Post's claim that he was related to Charles Keating.

The jury's still out on whether he's a GOP spy.

Granted, Joe the Plumber didn't do himself any favors when he told CBS News' Katie Couric that Obama gave a "tap dance ... almost as good as Sammy Davis Jr."

Former GOP presidential candidate Mike Huckabee, who plans to interview Wurzelbacher on his FOX News show Saturday night, tried to put the plumber phenomenon in perspective.

"What he represents is not so much plumbing," Huckabee said. "What he represents is a guy who really just wants the government to leave him alone."

If the media are any example, good luck with that, Joe.

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The jury's still out on whether he's a GOP spy.

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Rosie the Riveter' model going strong at 85

By Loretta Waldman, The Hartford Courant

SIMSBURY, Conn. — At 79, Patricia Berberich is certainly old enough to have heard of Rosie the Riveter, but when it came to placing a face with the name, she admits her mind was blank.
So, when the woman dining with her one evening this spring at the McLean retirement home mentioned having been the model for artist Norman Rockwell's World War II-era heroine, Berberich politely excused herself to do a little research.

"My instinct was to get right to the Internet and look it up," she said. "Then I sent off to (the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Mass.) to get a poster so she could sign it."

Berberich was hardly the first to make that request of Rosie, whose real name is Mary Doyle Keefe. Since posing for Rockwell in 1942, she has signed countless posters and autographs.

The painting, for which Keefe posed twice and was paid $10, came to embody the can-do attitude of American women whose work helped win the war. It is arguably among the most recognizable images of World War II and transformed Keefe from a small-town switchboard operator into an American icon.

Keefe thinks of herself as an accidental celebrity and still gets a thrill out of telling her story of posing for Rockwell when she was a red-haired 19-year-old. She went on to graduate from college, work as a dental hygienist, marry and raise four children.

Now 85 and living in an apartment at the McLean Home, Keefe said the buzz surrounding her being Rosie began spreading soon after she moved there from New Hampshire two years ago to be closer to a daughter who lives in Granby.

"I got a kick out of it," said Berberich, a neighbor at McLean who dines with Keefe regularly. "I remember my classmates going off to war after graduation."

"It's quite an honor to be asked by Norman Rockwell to pose for a picture," added Marion Strindberg, another neighbor at the home. "It's generally known, but she just told a small group of us. She is very quiet about it. Word went around slowly."

Asked to recount the serendipitous events that led to her fateful encounter with Rockwell, Keefe recites a well-worn script she committed to memory long ago. She was living with her family in Arlington, Vt., at the time, not far from where Rockwell lived with his family and had a studio.

"The telephone office was in my mom's house, and he would come in to pay his bill," Keefe recalled. "He knew who I was and asked if I would sit for a picture. Gene Pelham, his photographer who moved from New York, would take a picture and Norman Rockwell would cut out what he wanted. You didn't sit there while he was painting the whole thing, which was good."

For the first sitting, Keefe wore a white blouse beneath her overalls and a pair of saddle shoes. The look, however, wasn't quite right, she said, so Rockwell had her pose a second time wearing a blue blouse and penny loafers

Keefe said she has received endless ribbing about the now famous image of a brawny working woman breaking for lunch with a ham sandwich in hand, pneumatic riveter on her lap and copy of Hitler's Mein Kampf underfoot. Her body looked nothing like that in real life, said Keefe, especially the muscular arms. Rockwell sent her a written apology.

"The kidding you took was all my fault, because I really thought you were the most beautiful woman I had ever seen," Rockwell wrote in the 1967 letter.

Rosie first appeared in 1943 on the cover of The Saturday Evening Post and, later, on war bond posters. Keefe said she didn't think of herself as special. Lots of townspeople posed for Rockwell during the 10 years he lived in Arlington, she said, including her uncle, who was in all four of the well-known Rockwell images popularly known as the "Four Freedoms".

Keefe's oldest son, Bill Keefe, recalls family trips to Arlington as a boy when his mother would walk down the street saying this or that person "was in such and such a painting by Rockwell."

"It was always a topic of conversation," he said. "It's part of the Keefe family legacy. We never had a problem coming up with a unique school project or something for show and tell."

But perhaps his proudest memory is of the Rockwell exhibition at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., about 10 years ago, to which his parents were invited and given a private tour. And in 2002, Mary Keefe and her late husband, Bob, were invited to New York by Sotheby's for an auction at which the Rosie the Riveter painting fetched $4.9 million, the world record for Rockwell's work at that time.

There, and at dozens of other events, Mary Keefe has gladly signed posters and given brief talks about her experience. She also has been a guest on national television, appearing on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno and Good Morning America during the 50th anniversary of D-Day.

At McLean, she keeps a lower profile, but even there can't escape attention.

To promote a Nov. 5 flu shot clinic for employees, Denise Yorio, a registered nurse and staff infection control practitioner, put up posters bearing Rosie's image and asked Keefe to autograph pictures. Nurses dressed up in "Rosie get-ups," she said, and rolled up their sleeves.

"We made it a big social event," Yorio said. "We've never done so many in such a short time."

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Media unfairly ganging up on ‘Joe the Plumber’

    A concerned citizen [“Joe the Plumber”] questions a presidential candidate about specifics regarding that candidate’s tax plan and suddenly he is vilified in the press [Oct. 17 Gazette].
His personal business is put on display as though he had committed some awful crime. The press seems to be trying to get the rest of us regular “Joes” to dissociate ourselves with him.
I guess poor old Joe is being used to serve as a warning to the rest of us.

DONNA TESSITORE
Glenville