Matt Yglesias thinks Joe the Plumber is nothing more than an ill-advised pander to the GOP base:
The idea behind the Joe the Plumber saga is that Barack Obama would be bad for people like Joe, a small business owner who is (putatively) prosperous enough to be hit by Obama’s tax hikes on people with over $250,000 in annual income. Of course Joe doesn’t actually earn that much. But if he had, Joe would just be the very model of a hard-core Republican. Whites are more Republican than non-whites. Men are more Republican than women. Small business owners are more Republican than any other occupational group. High-income people are more Republican than are middle-class and poor people. And among white people, those with no college degree are more Republican than those with college degrees.
Thus, a white male small-business owner practicing a blue collar trade and earning enough money to be hit by Obama’s tax hikes is nothing other than the Platonic Ideal of a Republican (think Tom DeLay when he owned a successful bug-killing business). Republican crowds go wild for Joe because they can identify with him. But by the same token, the people who identify with Joe are the Republican base. They can’t turn this thing around. And they’re certainly not the people you’re supposed to be talking to in October. It’d be as if Barack Obama were criss-crossing the country with a young, hip lesbian acting as his main surrogate to attack McCain’s health care plan.
This would be true but for one important detail. The factor Yglesias derides, then dismisses, is the key to Joe’s broader appeal and the actual “idea behind the Joe the Plumber saga”: Financially, Joe isn’t there yet — that’s the point. Aspiration is a fundamental American trait, one that reaches far beyond the GOP base. Every last one of Barack Obama’s unemployed, out-of-gas, debt-crippled sob stories shares with Joe the desire to make it — whatever “it” is for them. Joe the Septic Tank Mogul wouldn’t have the same effect.
In Joe, McCain has hit on Obama’s message of hope, but with a novel twist: he takes American voters to be self-sufficient adults. While Obama whets your appetite with the trinkets he plans to dole out, Joe ignites your hopes for personal achievement. This isn’t a contrast between conservative and liberal philosophy. It’s a contest between rejecting the American dream and embracing it. If people like Yglesias have come to consider the latter the sole domain of Republicans, it tells you a frightening lot about today’s Democrats.
Do we have to pour billions into trying to go to Mars right now?
Can we wait a few years, focus on the R&D and then go back to building space ships after we get our house in order?
Great to see that Obama is restoring NASA’s central role in climate science, and that he has indeed rejected the ideologically blinkered, anti-science Bush policies. Bush’s censorship and anti-intellectualism were a national disgrace.
America should rejoice in this enlightened progressive change.
I would rather a stimulus plan to get back to the moon and to mars. That in the long run will be an investiment that pays off big time. Unlike most of these crazy stimulus programs. Don’t kid yourselves, the Chinese and Indians are trying to get there, as are the Russians.
Shhhhh… Abe. The “A” that matters in NASA is “Administration.”
What does it take to put Congress in deep space?
275 mill just blown out in space, i thought liberals cares about poor and social spending rather than science?
Yes, let’s send the congress in space for goodwill.
#2 “America should rejoice in this enlightened visionary of Bush not Obama.”
JackMaco doesn’t know what he’s talking about. NSF funding increased more in the Bush years than it did in the Clinton years.
But regardless of the wackos on the left, we should drop our cynicism here. This was a “tragic” event in the sense that it involved the work of many serious individuals for many years.
The measurements provided by the satellite would be a great resource for “believers” and “skeptics” alike. With reliable data, the scientific arguments would be much better put.
In the age of 2 trillion bailouts, 300 million doesn’t seem that much, but all the work and dedication put in this enterprise by many serious people should not be underestimated.