From the aftermath of former Secretary of State Colin Powell\u2019s endorsement of Barack Obama on NBC\u2019s \u201cMeet the Press\u201d to George Stephanopoulos\u2019 repeated dismissals of Newt Gingrich on ABC\u2019s \u201cThis Week\u201d, yesterday the Sunday talk shows all but declared the election over.\u00a0 Can John McCain still win even so?\u00a0 Yes.\u00a0 Joe the Plumber is part of why.<\/p>\n
First the numbers.<\/p>\n
It is true that the Real Clear Politics moving average of polls has shown the race closing.\u00a0 But this is because two outliers — one showing as much as ten points separating the candidates — dropped off as more recent polls were added.\u00a0 Perhaps the race was as wide as the 8.2 percent that RCP reported on October 14th.\u00a0 But the daily update from the Rasmussen polling operations (the most accurate pollster in the nation in 2004) has termed the contest \u201cquite stable\u201d with the support for each candidate staying within a two-point band for the past three and a half weeks.<\/p>\n
Yes, the financial meltdown has hurt McCain but, at least to date, not enough to say the race has been put away.\u00a0 Rasmussen on Friday flagged three groups \u2013 men (who split 50-50), ages 40-64 (also tied) and conservatives (where Obama was doing better among liberals than McCain among conservatives).\u00a0 In all three groups, McCain was underperforming GOP norms.\u00a0 Since then, men and conservatives have moved toward McCain.\u00a0 Rasmussen doesn\u2019t show age breakdowns daily, but chances are they can be moved further with the themes that McCain crystallized in the Wednesday night debate.\u00a0 This is where Joe the Plumber comes in.<\/p>\n
Watching Barack Obama on YouTube tell Joe \u201cThe Plumber\u201d Wurzelbacher that, if he succeeds in acquiring that two-man plumbing firm and increases his income to $260,000, yes, Obama will make him \u201cspread the wealth\u201d, then hearing Senator Obama deride Mr. Wurzelbacher at a Friday rally, it was hard not to suspect that something more is going on in the Democratic candidate\u2019s economic program than just the cluelessness of an academic liberal out of Chicago\u2019s upscale Hyde Park neighborhood. The senator\u2019s responses to Joe left Obamanomics looking less and less a crusade to save the middle class, as Obama has maintained.\u00a0 Instead his program looks like a payoff for one of America\u2019s most powerful special interest groups \u2013 labor unions.<\/p>\n
Consider Obama\u2019s union-driven agenda.<\/p>\n
There is abrogating NAFTA, hardly in the broad public interest when studies show that jobs and national living standards have increased thanks to NAFTA.\u00a0 But some major unions fear that their contracts cannot stand up to North American, not to mention global, competition.\u00a0 So with a public-be-damned attitude, they want the treaty thrown out, and Senator Obama has gone along.<\/p>\n
Then there is card check, to abolish secret ballots in union certification elections.\u00a0 The Supreme Court has established elaborate and just rules to insure workplace democracy.\u00a0 But this body of decisions is statute-based, not Constitution-based, rooted in labor legislation from the Wagner Act to Taft-Hartley to Landrum-Griffin.\u00a0 What Congress gives, Congress can take away \u2013 and Obama has promise to ask Congress to do just that.\u00a0 Unions have been losing private sector elections for decades.\u00a0 They represented only 7.5 percent of the workforce in 2007.\u00a0 Fearing further losses, the lords of labor have resolved to go back on one of the movement\u2019s most cherished and legitimizing principles \u2013 and, again, Senator Obama has gone enthusiastically along.<\/p>\n
Finally, there are the taxes Mr. Wurzelbacher asked about and Obama\u2019s union-endorsed health care plan \u2013 which, as Joe noted in an interview over the weekend, would impose its own tax on him, should he be able to buy that business.\u00a0 What do taxes on people like Mr. Wurzelbacher have to do with unions?<\/p>\n
The first Joe the Plumber hit article came from \u201cThe New York Times\u201d last Friday.\u00a0 It noted prominently that Mr. Wurzelbacher is not a member of the local plumbers union.\u00a0 What it did not say is that, in many regions and occupations, men and women like Mr. Wurzelbacher present at least as great a challenge to unions as does NAFTA or the reluctance of big-company workers to back organization campaigns.<\/p>\n
A long-time staple of Republican rhetoric is praise of the American spirit of enterprise and of the entrepreneur who embodies it.\u00a0 As a theme, it dates back to the late 1970s, when researchers at MIT discovered that the primary source of net new jobs in the United States was companies with five employees or fewer.\u00a0 Some of these firms became very big.\u00a0 Many grew to twenty or so employees.\u00a0 Some stayed about their size when they began.\u00a0 But while the Fortune 500\u2019s employment shrunk, employment in these companies expanded.<\/p>\n
The problem is that, like Joe on one end and Wal-Mart (a small company not so long ago) on the other, these new and unorganized businesses have been taking market share and employment from union-dominated ones.\u00a0\u00a0 So from labor\u2019s point of view, Joe the Plumber \u2013 who is better described as Joe the Aspiring Small Businessman \u2013 has become a real threat.<\/p>\n
This is the economic secret of the Obama campaign: taxing the rich won\u2019t impact truly wealthy people like Warren Buffet in any meaningful way.\u00a0 But it will put a brake on Joe and hundreds of thousands of other middle-class voters like him.\u00a0 Outside of the billionaires and near billionaires in Mr. Buffet\u2019s league, \u201cthe rich\u201d is not a static group.\u00a0 They are men and women in their peak earning years, many of whom have started or are working for smaller businesses.\u00a0 At any moment \u201cthe rich\u201d, as Senator Obama describes single people making $200,000\/year and married people making $250,000\/year, may be only five percent of the population, but over a working life, the category comprises a far larger share of the country.\u00a0 And much of these people\u2019s so-called income is tied up in their companies.<\/p>\n
The election\u2019s true economics can be summed up this way: The CEO of Lehman Brothers is reported to support Mr. Obama.\u00a0 While he is not demonstrative, Joe the Plumber gives every sign of supporting John McCain.<\/p>\n
And this brings us back to the groups in which Mr. McCain is underperforming and the prospects for this election.\u00a0 That 40-to-64 age cohort is the group heaviest with people who started or work in small businesses and who are in or entering their peak earning years.\u00a0 This is the group on which the election will turn.<\/p>\n
Does Senator McCain stand a chance?\u00a0 As things stand today, these are the people who will decide.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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