Joe Wurzelbacher from Toledo, Ohio — immortalized as “Joe the Plumber” after last night’s presidential debate, talked with Katie Couric and explained how it was he came to meet Barack Obama.
“Obama came to my neighborhood and my son and I were outside tossing the football, and all of a sudden he showed up, and there went our football tossing for a while. And, you know, neighbors were outside asking him questions, and I didn’t think they were asking him tough enough questions, so I thought, you know, I’ll go over there. You know, I’ve always wanted to ask one of these guys a question and really corner them and get them to answer a question of–for once instead of tap dancing around it. And unfortunately I asked the question but I still got a tap dance. Do you – almost as good as Sammy Davis Jr.”
After that fateful meeting, Wurzelbacher was invited on to Fox News to discuss his conversation with the Democratic candidate.
During the encounter in Ohio, Wurzelbacher asked the Illinois senator: “Your new tax plan is going to tax me more, isn’t it?”
Obama answered: “It’s not that I want to punish your success; I just want to make sure that everybody who is behind you that they’ve got a chance to success, too. I think when you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody.”
“His answer actually scared me even more,” the plumber told Fox News.
“Robin Hood stole from greedy rich people and redistributed it to the peasants, so to speak, so if he’s calling us peasants, I kind of resent that,” he said.
“He said he wants to distribute wealth. And I mean, I’m not trying to make statements here, but, I mean, that’s kind of a socialist viewpoint. You know, I work for that. You know, it’s my discretion who I want to give my money to, it’s not for the government to decide that I make a little too much and so I need to share it with other people. I just — that’s not the American Dream.”
He added that the American Dream for him was “you work hard. You’re going to get what you want eventually.”
After the debate, Wurzelbacher repeated his complaints, telling Couric, “Obama speaks well, but the one thing that’s really important, that everyone in America really need to know is, you know, talk is talk. You know, he can speak pretty, but, you know, there’s got to be action behind it. We’ve seen McCain, we know his actions. Even if you disagree with him, at least you know where he stands. McCain – or Obama, we’re not sure where he stands yet, even after his debates. Like I said, he speaks eloquently, better than I do, but I honestly, I still don’t know where he stands. He’s said a lot, but none of his experience has backed it up. You know, the only experience I’ve seen or his actions are raising our taxes, so, you know, I’m middle class. I can’t have my taxes raised anymore.”
View Katie Couric’s interview with Joe Wurzelbacher aka Joe the Plumber below.