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WORLD> America
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Obama warns against overconfidence
(Agencies)
Updated: 2008-10-17 15:26 The new star in US politics, at least for a news cycle or two, is Joe Wurzelbacher, "Joe the plumber," who told Obama at a campaign stop that he wanted to buy a small plumbing business in Holland, Ohio.
Joe came up about two dozen times during the debate as each candidate argued that their prescriptions for America's economic ills would help the plumber best. Wurzelbacher was all over morning television shows and was not saying who he would vote for, but he sounded like a McCain backer. "McCain came across with some solid points, and I was real happy about that," he told the Toledo Blade newspaper. McCain, speaking at a rally in Downingtown, Pennsylvania, quickly worked Wurzelbacher into his stump speech, arguing that small business operators like Joe the plumber would see their taxes go up under Obama. "Senator Obama told Joe that he wanted to spread his wealth around. America didn't become the greatest nation on earth by spreading the wealth; we became the greatest nation by creating new wealth," McCain said. Although McCain went after Obama aggressively in the final debate, it might not have done much to change the shape of the race in its final stages. Difficult Odds Karl Rove, the architect of President George W. Bush's two electoral victories and now a political pundit, wrote in The Wall Street Journal on Thursday that McCain faced difficult but not impossible odds. "If Mr. McCain succeeds, he will have engineered the most impressive and improbable political comeback since Harry Truman in 1948. But having to reach back more than a half-century for inspiration is not the place campaign managers want to be now," Rove wrote. The two candidates were on the same stage again on Thursday night, trading wisecracks instead of campaign attacks at the Al Smith charity dinner, a political tradition in Manhattan named for the former New York governor and a regular stop for presidential candidates. |
