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McCain hopes to change fortunes with ?Joe' campaign, but its effectiveness is unclear
(St. Louis Post-Dispatch Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) WASHINGTON _ Joe the Entrepreneur, Joe the Shadow and other Joes from all walks of life are responding to a John McCain video contest, part of his late offensive skewering Barack Obama's tax proposals.
"I work very hard for what I earn and I don't need Barack Obama to tell me how to spread my money around," says Joe the Magician, a professional magician from Atlanta and video contributor who turns dollar bills into hundred-dollar notes in front of the camera.
In the campaign's final days, McCain is attempting a magic act of his own: trying to reverse his political fortunes by relying heavily on Obama's promise to "spread the wealth" when he met Joe Wurzelbacher, the now-famous Ohio plumber.
So far, the Joe campaign and the GOP effort to paint Obama as a "socialist" appears to be having little impact, judging by polls showing Obama's leads in Ohio and several other battleground states steady or widening. An exception is Missouri, which remains a tossup according to a new St. Louis Post-Dispatch poll.
The latest batch of state surveys analyzed Friday by pollster.com showed states accounting for 268 electoral votes in the "strong Obama" column _ just two shy of the 270 needed in the Electoral College. Similarly, National Journal's Hotline counted states providing 266 solid Obama electoral votes, more than double the number firmly in McCain's corner.
National polls are every bit as daunting for McCain. They showed him behind by double digits late last week, 13 points in a New York Times poll, 11 points an ABC News survey and 10 points in a Fox News poll.
The results painted a uniform picture of voters' worries about the economy and a growing sense that Obama would be best suited to repair the financial damage to the nation.
In the Post-Dispatch's poll in Missouri, for instance, by a 9-point margin voters said they trusted Obama more than McCain on the economy. In the ABC News national poll, Obama held a 17-point advantage on the economic question.
McCain hopes his use of Joe-the-Plumber themes _ in ads, videos and stump speeches _ can narrow that gap.
"He (Obama) believes in redistributing wealth, not in policies that grow our economy and create jobs," McCain said Friday in Colorado. "Senator Obama is more interested in controlling wealth than in creating it, in redistributing money instead of spreading opportunity."
McCain's "Joe" strategy is about more than the economy, noted pollster Charles Franklin, a University of Wisconsin professor and co-developer of pollster.com and the Big Ten Battleground Poll.
Franklin recalled that last summer, Obama's momentum had stalled amid a growing perception that he was "a far-left liberal." With the nation being what Franklin describes as center-right on the political spectrum, McCain was able to draw even despite mounting dissatisfaction with the Bush administration.
Painting Obama as a spread-the-wealth lefty gives McCain the opportunity to rekindle those sentiments, Franklin said, adding: "with one obvious problem _ that it was a Republican president that just bought out the banks."
But Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg said a survey he took last week shows the strategy isn't working. Pollsters read voters a recent McCain statement about "Obama's socialist policies" and plan to raise taxes, then read them an Obama assertion that "no one earning under a quarter-million dollars" would see higher taxes. Voters overwhelmingly sided with Obama, he said.
The findings suggested to Greenberg that the McCain offensive could backfire, given voters' concerns about government tilting policies toward the rich.
"Now we're having a debate on that," he said.
Terry Nelson, political director for the Bush-Cheney campaign four years ago, is among the Republicans who believes that Joe the Plumber can work.
"It's something voters can identify with. Rather than an abstract policy debate, it is a real effort about a real person trying to build a business and be successful. And we live in a country where people want to have freedom to be successful," he said.
Under Obama's plan, individuals making over $200,000 annually and families who report income of $250,000 or more would see their tax rates rise from 35 percent to the 39.6 percent rate that was in place during much of the 1990s.
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Andy Roth, director of government affairs for the fiscally conservative Club for Growth, argued that increasing that rate while reducing taxes at lower income levels amounts to "Marxist theory, taking from the rich and giving to the poor ... Why should we give more money to a government that has clearly demonstrated that it is reckless and irresponsible as far as spending?"
Tax experts note that the upper-income rate has seldom been lower than 35 percent since the government started imposing taxes on income early last century. The rate reached as high as 90 percent in the 1950s to pay for the Korean War.
Roberton Williams, an analyst at the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center in Washington, said politicians of all stripes have long bought into a system that taxes wealthier people at higher rates.
"If a progressive tax system is socialism, then we've been a socialist country since 1913 when we first put tax system in place," he said.
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Experts on socialism dismiss the notion that Obama harbors socialist tendencies. They point to his financial support from wealthy investors and his connections with advisers like Robert Rubin, of Citigroup.
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Richard Wolff is an economist at the University of Massachusetts and co-author of the book "New Departures in Marxian Theory."
"There's no way that Mr. Obama would be getting the contributions from corporate America that he is getting if they had the faintest suspicion that their positions in the economy would be jeopardized," he said.
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Yet it's neither professors nor tax analysts who McCain is trying to reach with his tax appeal. It's voters like Jane Word, 73, a nurse in St. Louis, who say she's voting Republican in November and understands Joe the Plumber.
"I know Obama has a socialist agenda," she said, in words that might come straight from a McCain ad. "He wants to spread the wealth around."
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(St. Louis Post-Dispatch correspondent Bob Albrecht contributed to this report.)
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(c) 2008, St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
Visit the Post-Dispatch on the World Wide Web at http://www.stltoday.com/
Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.
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Copyright ? 2008 St. Louis Post-Dispatch
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