Joe the Plant

Martin Eisenstadt tells us "You don't know Joe" (via Crooks and Liars):

Turns out that Joe Wurzelbacher from the Toledo event is a close relative of Robert Wurzelbacher of Milford, Ohio. Who's Robert Wurzelbacher? Only Charles Keating's son-in-law and the former senior vice president of American Continental, the parent company of the infamous Lincoln Savings and Loan. The now retired elder Wurzelbacher is also a major contributor to Republican causes giving well over $10,000 in the last few years.

You see, that's what happens when you have a Presidential candidate that doesn't know anything about the Internets. They sit on info that might have been difficult to track down twenty years ago but is relatively easy to find today via strategic Googling.

Of course, McCain's campaign staff doesn't have that excuse. No, they're just hoping that the mainstream media outlets simply won't pick up on it because they're too enthralled interviewing Joe the Plumber. And they may be right. We'll see.

And as Martin says in the piece, none of this makes Joe a bad guy necessarily, but it does tarnish the average "Joe" image he's quickly building up. It also makes it appear that the whole moment between Joe and Obama was orchestrated to lead up to the debate and McCain's use of him as a political prop.

It's not exactly a shameful tactic (not compared, say, to equating Obama to terrorists), but it is a very political one, and not one that puts McCain in a good light.