division and race in politics, understanding joe the plumber

I read an interesting article today in the NY Times. The article talked about the real Joe Plumber that was brought up by John McCain in the third presidential debate. McCain voiced that Joe, the unlicensed, back-taxing, plumber would be hurt by Obama’s tax plan because his business would make over $250,000 a year. When I first heard McCain say this, my first thoughts, jokingly, were “I’m in the wrong business.” Jokingly, because although I am sure there may be a few plumbers that manage to make that amount of money in a year, the average in Ohio, like Joe, is much lower, $47,930. Joe is going to have to triple his business that he can’t have legally because he doesn’t have a plumber’s license to do that.

But, this isn’t about Joe, directly. It’s about the tactics and divisions. The article is written by Paul Krugman, a Democrat. So, you might think this is biased. Except that Paul is also the Nobel Prize winner in Economic Science for 2008. So, I also think he knows what he is talking about. Krugman goes on to state how McCain is using the same divide and conquer tactics that Richard Nixon used to win votes. Nixon and company thought, as Krugman says, that by exploiting the divisions over the Vietnam War, cultural divisions, and most of all racial divisions he could win the election. Nixon explained to the regular, working white guy, “hey these changes suck and I can help”. Nixon, instead of having the regular working white guy get mad at him too, decided to create division and have the regular white guy get mad at the divisions of the political left, people of different cultures, and people of different races.

Of course Nixon didn’t create this idea. I am sure it has been going on for thousands of years. It has been going on in America for hundreds of years. In 1676, Bacon’s rebellion was poor white and blacks rebelling against the elite of the Virginia colony. The ruling elite in Virginia instead of spreading the wealth, creating jobs (you get the picture), decided to pin the poor whites against the poor blacks. This did two things. It stopped the rebellions against the rich and it caused the poor whites to be divided against the poor blacks. Some experts say this actually created racism in North America. I would certainly not go that far. There is too much history that says otherwise. But it certainly did create racial problems along with laws that were enacted soon after the rebellion.

Krugmans point in his article was clear: the GOP is not the working class, but the party of plutocrats. The elite GOP and the white working class America are together, but only because of the division and politics that have been created. Joe may not like Obama, but the candidate that Joes likes certainly doesn’t like him.