A cigarette and a chat with Joe the Plumber

04 March 2009

Freddy Gray meets Middle America’s radicals of the Right at the Conservative Political Action Conference, a gathering that is both bonkers and vitally important to the Republican party

GOP veterans point to certain changes in the atmosphere. Nobody, for instance, pretends that Bush II is a hero any more. And there’s a growing enthusiasm for Ron Paul, the 73-year-old maverick congressman from Texas. In 2008, Dr Paul, a strict fiscal and anti-war conservative then running for president, was largely dismissed by the CPAC faithful as a good-natured crank. He was even booed when he criticised the war on terror. This year, however, it is hard to look anywhere without seeing a group of his supporters in their red ‘Campaign for Liberty’ T-shirts.

It’s still not clear, though, that everyone entirely understands Dr Paul’s message. The crowd roars him on as he attacks President Barack Obama’s multi-trillion-dollar stimulus plans and the big-government programmes of the Bush years, but they don’t exactly follow him on foreign policy. When, for example, Paul says, ‘We went to get rid of a bad guy in Iraq. We did. But ...one million Iraqis got killed,’ a section of the audience starts clapping their approval. ‘Believe me, they weren’t all terrorists,’ insists the Texan congressman. His listeners fall quiet, evidently disturbed.

They are more enthusiastic about the next high-profile speaker, Mitt Romney — another failed presidential candidate, but one who is happy to talk tough about ‘America’s enemies’. He makes aggressive noises against Iran and Russia, much to the delight of the assembled. It later emerges that, for the third year running, Romney had won CPAC’s straw poll on who should be the next Republican presidential nominee. Ron Paul’s revolutionaries leave the Omni Shoreham disappointed.

Outside, I bump into a bald man smoking. It’s Joe the Plumber. He looks exhausted. I scrounge a cigarette from him and we stand together puffing away. I ask him what the future holds. ‘I think I am going to take on the IRS,’ he says. ‘If not, I guess I go back to doing what I was doing.’ A young conference attendee approaches us, breathless with excitement, and asks for Joe’s opinion on the best way of reforming American democracy. Joe listens patiently to the boy’s ambitious schemes. He cracks an avuncular smile, puts out his cigarette, and says: ‘I’ll have to think about that and get back to you.’ With that, he shuffles back towards the hotel, perhaps to sort out the Republican party, or maybe just to fix a leak.