Something about John McCain's use of Joe the Plumber has sounded eerily familiar to me.  Joe, says Mr. McCain, epitomizes the common man who sees plainly what the pundits and the Eastern Establishment, perhaps willfully, turn a blind eye to, that Barack Obama wants to "spread the wealth", and is, in fact, a socialist.

Today it came to me.  Turn back the clock to May, 1965.  Former Alabama governor George C. Wallace, who arrived on the national stage as an opponent of school desegregation, beginning his run for president in New Hampshire, gave a speech at Dartmouth College.  He said, "The theoreticians sit in their ivory towers and tell us what to say and we're getting tired of it.  Castro was called the Robin Hood of the Caribbean by the New York Times.  Every cab driver in Alabama could look at Castro and know by instinct he was a Communist."  (Marshall Cobleigh, We Ain't Making Sausage Here, p. 113.)

I was 11 years old in 1965.  My father was a strong supporter of George Wallace, and I, naturally, took after my father.  George Wallace seemed a kind of Braveheart, standing up to the snooty lords in their castles.  Forty years on, this Know-Nothing nativism is alive and well, and John McCain, as did George W. Bush, has taken up its standard.