A few weeks ago, in a large business hotel in Washington DC, a crowd of around 80 people had congregated outside one of the ballrooms when the double doors opened and a bald man in jeans and a lumberjack shirt backed out into the hallway. He was bent almost in half, wedging the doors open. "We're almost ready to begin!" he called out. The crowd, who were waiting for a panel discussion on the future of the American right, entitled Conservatism 2.0, paid only partial attention: the organisers had just started distributing sandwiches and cans of Coke, which interested them more. Then the man stood up, and brushed off his hands on his jeans. He smelled strongly of aftershave.
"Oh. My. God," someone said quietly.
Slowly at first, then faster, the realisation began to spread through the crowd that the bald man in the lumberjack shirt was Joe the Plumber. Within seconds he'd been mobbed. The panel discussion was part of the 2009 Conservative Political Action Conference, or CPAC, an annual gathering of rightwing activists, and soon news of Joe's arrival had filtered down the corridors to more of the 8,500 delegates. Young women bounded up with mobile phones, demanding photos. Young men in bow ties - there were a lot of young men in bow ties - thrust their hands forward. Joe posed obligingly for every photo, shook every hand.
"Oh, man, this is going to be my Facebook profile picture," one woman said to a friend. "You can fix my pipes anytime, Joe!" an older man yelled. Joe smiled, pretending to find the remark ingeniously amusing. True, he may not really be called Joe, and he may not really be a plumber, due to a few questions regarding his licence, and he may have come to symbolise the cheap populism and anti-intellectual rabble-rousing that helped lose John McCain the 2008 presidential election. But let it be stated for the record that Joe the Plumber is an incredibly patient man.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/apr/18/us-politics-republican-party
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