interesting article..

In other words, the real Samuel Wurzelbacher was precisely the sort of citizen who would have benefited most from Obama’s proposed policies. Yet the distance between what “Joe” imagined his status to be and its reality says a great deal both about the inflated condition of the American dream, and the deflated reality of the American worker. Joe the Plumber, in other words, was a perfect cipher for the complications of class anxiety afflicting many Americans.

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In dealing with the divisiveness of this moment, I think President Obama should address the degree to which careless housing speculation and the investment bubbles of the last decade represented not merely greed at the top of the ladder (as it surely did) but also an overly-fueled sense of ordinary-guy expectation that, alas, was rooted in the purely imaginary. Many of us will have to wake up from that dream and face the bitter disappointment that is the emotional cost of those colossal miscalculations.

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In addition, this more-or-less legitimate sense of having been cheated has been exploited by unprecedented levels of demagoguery, confusion, and outright lying in our recent public discourse. This poisonous noise obscures the commonality (but for the richest two percent) of our predicament as citizens.

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