NASHVILLE, Tenn. – Like all good celebrities, Joe the Plumber has hired a publicity team.

The Press Office in Nashville, where clients include rockers Grand Funk Railroad and Eddie Money, will help him handle the flood of interview and appearance requests that have poured in since he was mentioned during a presidential debate and quickly became a household name.

“It’s like any other celebrity who is in the public eye,” said Jim Della Croce, who owns the agency. “There needs to be someone acting as a clearinghouse and interpreting the opportunities and coordinating the media requests, and he truly is being inundated.”

Despite rumors to the contrary, he’s not planning to release an album, though a book is in the works.
  
“He’s not doing a country record,” Della Croce said flatly Thursday. “I think that was an angle that was presumptuous.”

Joe the Plumber, better known as Samuel J. “Joe” Wurzelbacher, 34, of Ohio, gained national attention last month when Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama told him during a campaign stop that he wanted to “spread the wealth around.”

Their exchange about Obama’s tax plan aired countless times on cable news programs. Republican nominee John McCain repeatedly cited Joe the Plumber in a debate, saying Obama’s plan would hurt people like him who want to own their own businesses.

Wurzelbacher campaigned for the Republican ticket on his own bus tour around Ohio this week and appeared with Sarah Palin on Wednesday. His name comes up at just about every GOP rally.

But with the election next week, what’s next?

A lot of things are too premature to talk about, Della Croce said, but a book is already planned.
 
“Certainly Joe will go down in history and will be a celebrity regardless of which way the election turns,” Della Croce said. “He is a curiosity. He’s touched a nerve with the common man, and people are curious as to what’s on his mind. I think he speaks for a lot of people.”

So many, apparently, that he needs three managers at The Press Office, among them country singer Aaron Tippin. Wurzelbacher met Tippin, also a McCain supporter, when they appeared on former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee’s Fox News talk show.

The media scrutiny hasn’t always been kind to Wurzelbacher, who turned out to be an unlicensed plumber with unpaid back taxes.

At first, Wurzelbacher insisted he wanted no part of the spotlight and predicted he’d be a small footnote in the campaign.

“I’m a flash in the pan, a novelty. It’s going to be a fun couple of days,” he said.

It has lasted much longer.

Della Croce has managed rock stars, but Joe the Plumber is a special case.
  
“Never in 25 years have I seen this level of interest in a celebrity,” Della Croce said.

As this historic presidential campaign ends, let us take a moment to salute the Average Joes who stood up to be counted and were reduced to catchy first names and occupations in a cynical effort to win votes with a folksy tone.

I know it’s tough out there on the campaign trail trying to connect to people who don’t have seven (eight? nine?) houses, so the best way to get down here with us, the unwashed and easily swayed, is to slap on a label that makes us feel important or at least noticed from the jet at 30,000 feet above fly-over states or through the tinted windows of the Straight Talk Express.

My label? I’m just plain, ol’ Scott the Smart ***.

So, here’s to all those who made a name-check appearance in a candidate’s stump speech on that campaign trail, a trail of terror that seemed to go on forever and ever and ever and ever like this sentence and eventually made me want to rip my ears off with a pair of pliers so I could hear no more of it.

I may leave out a few people, but I tip my hat (which was recently foreclosed upon), to:

Joe the Plumber.
Joe the Plumber (yes, he deserves to be mentioned twice based on sheer overkill).
Phil the Farmer.
Jimmy the Greek.
Sammy the Bull.
Frank the Tank.
Kermit the Frog.
Stan the Man.
Sam the Shafted.
Krusty the Clown.
Reggie the Transvestite Airline Pilot.
Dora the Explorer.
Attila the Hun.
Zorak the Alien (sent here on a recon mission to see if earth is suitable to inhabit by the war-like people of the planet Orlaz-9, who will employ their shrink-rays to subdue us and force us to do their bidding.)
Fritz the Cat.
Billy the Kid.
T-Bone the Dude (who set Ray-Ray’s pants on fire during 5th-period study hall and got pepper-sprayed by the resource officer.)
Alexander the Great.
Alexander the Just OK.
Alexander the Absolutely Awful.
Mott the Hoople.
Vlad the Impaler.
Greg the Guy (who lived in my dorm and successfully flushed 12 tennis balls down the toilet.)
Eric the Red.
Red (the) Barber.
Brutus “The Barber” Beefcake.
Gus the Field Goal Kicking Mule.
Abdullah the Butcher (the greatest professional wrestler to ever routinely stick a fork in someone’s head.)
Jack the Ripper.
Vinnie the Torch.
Tony the Tiger.
Billy the Bum (”who lived by the thumb and sang of the hobo’s delight,” if there are any John Prine fans out there.)
Bob the Builder.
Conan the Destroyer.
Randy the Rebuilder.

…I could go on, but my brain hurts and I realize this has become tedious for most readers (e-mail me more of ‘em at rhollifield@mcdowellnews.com). Thank you, Joe the Plumber and all of your name/occupation cohorts. Good luck with your future endorsement deals. You deserve them for your endurance of this campaign.

At John McCain’s rallies these days, the talk is of taxes and Joe the Plumber and the financial crisis and mortgage relief and an end to wasteful federal spending. Those are all perfectly fine things for a campaign to emphasize; polls show voters of all stripes are overwhelmingly concerned about the economy.

Republican John McCain is holding a series of “Joe the Plumber” events aimed at blue-collar workers as he hopes to keep Florida from swinging to Barack Obama.

He’s riding the “Straight Talk Express” from Ormond Beach on the Atlantic Coast to Sarasota on the Gulf Coast, a route that traverses the vote-rich “I-4 Corridor” through central Florida.

McCain also plans to make some informal stops along the way in between the more formal rallies.

Recent polls show McCain and Obama running close, but Obama has been bombarding Florida with TV ads while campaigning with Senator Hillary Clinton.

Early voting in Florida started Monday and about 150,000 people have already cast their ballots.

Meanwhile, Barack Obama is addressing the constant criticisms of his tax plan coming from John McCain.

McCain claims Obama wants to redistribute wealth, prompting Obama to start giving a point-by-point rebuttal of those arguments, which he’ll make today in Indiana.
 
In yet another state that voted Republican in 2004, Obama plans to tell voters that it’s he, not McCain, who would provide more new tax relief to middle-class families.

After a morning rally, Obama heads to Hawaii to visit his ill grandmother.

Yesterday in Virginia, Obama said the difference between his plan and McCain’s is in who would actually get a tax cut. He says McCain “is in cahoots with Joe the CEO.”

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — The McCain-Palin presidential campaign is holding press conferences with North Carolina “Joe the Plumbers” today to discuss why John McCain’s policies are good for small business.

Small business owners in Fayetteville gathered at 11 a.m. at Carolina Specialties, 525 Gillespie St. and at a small business in Greenville.

The McCain campaign is inviting supporters to submit videos explaining how they are “Joe the Plumber” and why they are supporting Senator McCain and Governor Palin.  Videos may be used in an official campaign ad.  People can submit their videos by visiting http://www.johnmccain.com/Joe/.

TOLEDO, Ohio – John McCain and Barack Obama are running close in Ohio, a state President Bush won the last two elections, and Andy Mance may help explain why the Republicans are having trouble pulling away as the 2008 campaign reaches its conclusion.

The Toledo businessman, a self-professed GOP moderate, says he likes McCain but has trouble with the “Joe the Plumber” story the GOP nominee’s been telling nonstop for the better part of a week. Joe the Plumber himself undercut the tale over the weekend, when Joe Wurzelbacher of Holland, Ohio, revealed he made far less than $250,000 a year. A week earlier, he complained to Obama that the Democrat’s plan to increase taxes for people earning more than that could keep him from buying the two-person plumbing company where he works.

“The $250,000 remark, I don’t make $250,000,” Wurzelbacher said Sunday on “Fox and Friends.” “You know, I’ve never even come close to that, nor will I. I mean, I’d have to work, I don’t know, 10 years to get that kind of money, maybe more.”

Regardless, the symbolism is lost on Mance, who attended a rally McCain held Sunday just nine miles from Wurzelbacher’s home. Both Mance and Wurzelbacher live in a battleground state with 20 electoral votes.