Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher, who shot to brief fame during the 2008 US presidential election as “Joe the Plumber”, has died aged 49. Cause of death was pancreatic cancer, his wife, Katie Wurzelbacher, told news outlets.
Fifteen years ago, Wurzelbacher became famous after arguing with the then Democratic candidate, Barack Obama, on the campaign trail in Toledo, Ohio. Wurzelbacher asked Obama if he would pay more taxes if the Democrat won. Obama, then a US senator from Illinois, conceded that he might.
Wurzelbacher then told Family Security Matters, a rightwing group: “Initially, I started off asking him if he believed in the American dream and he said yes, he does – and then I proceeded to ask him, then, why he’s penalising me for trying to fulfill it.”
Defining his own American dream as “a house, a dog, a couple rifles, a bass boat”, Wurzelbacher said he told Obama he wanted to buy his own business but feared the Democrat wanted “to redistribute [his money] to other people”.
Fame followed. As the Guardian put it: “The 2008 US presidential election belongs to just one man: Joe the Plumber. On Saturday Joe Wurzelbacher was, well, an ordinary Joe. Or to use a Sarah Palinism [McCain’s running mate, then Alaska governor], a Joe Six Pack. Yesterday he woke to find himself transformed into an international phenomenon.”
In the final debate, the Republican candidate, Arizona senator John McCain, repeatedly invoked “Joe the Plumber” as an everyman who stood to suffer under Obama. Looking into the camera, McCain said: “Joe, I want to tell ya. I’ll keep your taxes low.”
Obama won – and Wurzelbacher’s brush with fame soured with revelations that he was both not a fully licensed plumber and owed more than $1,000 in taxes.
He did not say which way he voted in 2008 but he did run for Congress as a Republican in 2010, the year of the far-right Tea Party wave. Wurzelbacher won the GOP nomination to contest Ohio’s ninth US House district but lost heavily in November.
On Monday, Tom LoBianco, a reporter and biographer of current Republican presidential hopeful Mike Pence, said: “Every time I hear about Ivy League folks running as ‘populists’, it’d make me wonder about Joe the Plumber and why you don’t get more actual blue-collar candidates.”
LoBianco also linked Wurzelbacher’s brush with fame to current arguments over the song Rich Men North of Richmond and its author, the factory worker turned singer Oliver Anthony.
News of Wurzelbacher’s death, LoBianco said, “meshes with … Oliver Anthony asking politicos to stop stealing his tune for their benefit. When I’m on the trail talking with ‘normies’ outside the political bubble … the anger and frustration tends to be broad-based, not cleanly targeted.”
