On Joe the Plumber

The media has decided that Joe the plumber is the crystallizing moment of the third debate. It's all very silly, because Joe voted for McCain in the primaries (so how undecided is he?) and because nobody seems to know if the 250,000 dollars he mentions as his income is revenue or profit (which is what he'd be actually taxed on) and so on.

Still, we are supposed to see Joe as the composite American, the average guy, whose life is exactly like the lives of everybody else! Exactly! Except that Joe is white and can never worry about the health exception to abortion, say. And I'd bet that people who write about how very average he is have rather little in common with Joe.