Bill The Pie Maker

Move over, Joe the Plumber. Meet Bill:

As Obama tells the story — which he does at every available opportunity — Seip's employees fingered the boss as "a die-hard Republican." When Seip showed up with pieces of pie for his VIP customers, Obama challenged him about his political views.

"How's business?" the Illinois senator says he asked. After the restaurateur complained about it, Obama says he shot back, "Tell me, who has been running the economy the past eight years?" The crowds at rallies love it when he says Seip "should think about voting Democrat."

The butt of Obama's campaign trail joke is laughing all the way to the bank. Seip says his business, off 40% this summer, has taken a sudden upswing since the Democratic presidential hopeful showed up and started telling audiences all across the country that he picked the Fireside because it was supposed to have "the best pies in town."

As for Joe the Plumber, you know, the typical low information voter who'd rather vote against Obama's tax cuts for him because he's worried about the taxes on the money he hasn't even made yet, Thomas Frank said:

The "perception of reality," on the other hand, is an amazing political tonic, and with it conservatives have cemented a factproof worldview of lasting power. It is simply this: Conservatives are authentic and liberals are not. The country is divided into a land of the soulful, hard-working producers and a land of the paper-pushing parasites; a plain-spoken heartland and the sinister big cities, where they breed tricky characters like Barack Obama, all "eloquence," as John McCain sneered in last week's presidential debate, but hard to pin down...

Joe's town may be circling the drain, but Joe's real concern, as the world knows, is that he might have to pay more taxes when his ship finally comes in. For good measure, Joe also declares Social Security "a joke": "I've never believed in it," he told reporters last week. Maybe that's because this realest of men knows that Social Security is just a hippie dream, despite the Census's insistence that 28% of his city's households received income from that source in 2003. Maybe all those people would be better off if we had invested Social Security's trust fund in WaMu and Wachovia -- you know, the real deal.

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