About that Joe the Plumber interview...

The Daily has gotten quite a bit of unanticipated attention in the national media after Politico and Wonkette both picked up on an interview with Joe the Plumber that ran in our Nov. 11 issue.

As this unexpected symbol of working-class America begins to fade away following the election, the interview we ran has been frequently caricaturized. The prevailing opinion, it seems, is that Samuel J. Wurzelbacher (aka Joe) must truly be desperate if he's speaking to a college newspaper. After all, he only recently monopolized an entire presidential debate.

Perhaps the most blatant exaggeration came last night on "Countdown with Keith Olbermann." On the show, VH1's Christian Finnegan said, "Honestly, when you consider this interview's source, I don't think we're going to have J the P's folk wisdom around much longer ... Ten days before Joe [the] Plumber grants an exclusive interview to the Pennysaver circular you get at the grocery store."

Is it amusing that a quizzical Finnegan, trying to decipher a Joe the Plumber quote, said that perhaps the folk figure could be citing the name of a song from the Muppets? Yes, probably. But it is certainly somewhat hypocritical for the mainstream media to give somebody (who by all accounts is a nobody) a podium, a microphone and a limelight, dare him to talk and then mock him for opening his mouth. Let's not forget that the media drives as much as it responds, so perhaps it is villifying a monster of its own creation.                      

On the theme of misconstruals, national outlets have also confused the Daily's relationship to the interview. Wonkette, for example, refers to "an interview with the Tufts college newspaper." To be clear, this interview ran in our op-ed section. The distinction is that it was not solicited or assigned by our editorial staff. The author conducted the interview on his own initiative and sent it in.

The point of our op-ed section is to spark discussion. And despite the fact that this has clearly been blown out of proportion, it has at least achieved that goal -- to a certain extent. On "Countdown," for example, questions arose about Joe's attempt in the interview to blame McCain for not supporting Palin enough. To contradict this claim, the show aired a clip of McCain praising Palin on national television following his loss. Was this clip cherry picked? Certainly. But it also touches at the heart of a fundamental rift in the Republican Party during the obligatory blame game that follows most presidential defeats.

Our Web site has also become a forum for discussion. Yesterday, we received thousands of more hits than on a typical day, and many visitors left behind trails on our comments section. Maybe they even checked out some of our other content as well.

Ultimately, while we're not to keen on comparisons to the Pennysaver, these few days of caricatures have been win-win: The national media gets to mock an increasingly unpopular figure, and we get hits. Does the end justify the means? Well, that's for you to decide.

-- Rob Silverblatt