In a speech delivered to be delivered on Friday, Senator John was set to criticize both the Obama campaign and media for going after a normal citizen, namely Joe Wurzelbacher. The media, McCain said, should not have treated “Joe the Plumber” as if he were a politician, who should be ‘vetted.’

In the speech as prepared for delivery McCain says: “The response from Senator Obama and his campaign yesterday was to attack Joe. People are digging through his personal life and he has TV crews camped out in front of his house. He didn’t ask for Senator Obama to come to his house. He wasn’t recruited or prompted by our campaign. He just asked a question. And Americans ought to be able to ask Senator Obama tough questions without being smeared and targeted with political attacks.”

Furthermore, McCain is expected to say, “[t]he question Joe asked about our economy is important, because Senator Obama’s plan would raise taxes on small businesses that employ 16 million Americans. Senator Obama’s plan will kill those jobs at just the time when we need to be creating more jobs. My plan will create jobs, and that’s what America needs.”

“Senator Obama says that he wanted to spread your wealth around. When politicians talk about taking your money and spreading it around, you’d better hold onto your wallet. Senator Obama claims that wants to give a tax break to the middle class, but not only did he vote for higher taxes on the middle class in the Senate, his plan gives away your tax dollars to those who don’t pay taxes. That’s not a tax cut, that’s welfare. America didn’t become the greatest nation on earth by redistributing wealth; we became the greatest nation by creating new wealth,” McCain will conclude.

To be fair to the Obama campaign: it does not seem that the campaign itself is going after “Joe the Plumber.” Instead, it are Obama’s allies in the media and blogosphere who do everything in their power to silence the man who asked Obama a very good question. Additionally, it has to be pointed out that the McCain campaign did not exactly help Wurzelbacher return to anonymity by mentioning the man’s name on every possible occasion and even using him in an ad.

However, that does not excuse the media and blogosphere. Both have gone insane over the man who was approached by Barack Obama himself, he did not walk up to Obama, Obama walked up to him, and who then asked Obama a very good question about taxes. The problem, in its true essence, was not what Joe said, or thought, or asked, or implied. Rather, it was Obama’s answer: “my goal is to, we wanna spread the wealth around,” Obama said.

Liberal bloggers and media personalities supportive of Obama know that this line could become a major problem for the Illinois Senator. If there is anything blue collar voters do not like, it’s a Democrat who promises to “spread the wealth around.” As most of them realize this will probably mean that, in the end, they too will see their taxes go up in order to “help” low income households.

Instead of dealing with what Obama said, however, these individuals chose to go after Wurzelbacher, the man who simply asked a question. They did this out of fear that Obama’s words could result in him losing tremendous support, and possibly even bungle the election. They went after Wurzelbacher because they, rightfully, feared that if people would talk more about the exchange between the plumber and Obama, McCain would rise in the polls, and Obama would tumble.

In other words; it was an attempt to personally destroy Wurzelbacher, so as to change the subject. When people would talk about whether or not Joe paid his taxes, they would not have time to think about Obama’s “spread the wealth around” remark.

Sadly for those individuals, I do not for one second that their plan will work. Instead, I consider it highly likely that “Average Joe” will look at what happens and think to himself “wait, so they’re just destroying a man who asked Obama a difficult question? This man is like I am. They would do this to me as well.” The result will be bad instead of good for Obama.

In response to the speech as prepared for delivery Politico published an article defending the media. This was quite interesting considering that one of the news sources McCain was undoubtedly speaking about was exactly this organization. Politico declared war on Wurzelbacher at the very moment the video of the exchange between him and Obama was published on YouTube and received attention on blogs. One cannot help but wonder whether the guys and few gals at Politico think that they are kidding anyone except themselves.

McCain’s speech seems to strike the right tone, by the way. He makes Obama’s remarks rather than “Joe the Plumber” the issue, as it should be. Nothing that Joe said could possibly result in Obama losing support; it were Obama’s own words that were potentially damaging, as the McCain campaign seems to understand full well.