As his appearance on Fox News Sunday showed once again, "Joe the Plumber" is John McCain's newest human shield. Wurzelbacher is just the latest prop rolled out to either lend McCain attributes he obviously lacks or to offer the supposed maverick a cloak of invulnerability to criticism. As it turns out, he joins a long list of McCain's metaphorical bodyguards including David Petraeus, Meg Whitman, Carly Fiorina and even John Lewis.
While the miraculous creation of Joe the Plumber now looks more like a not-so-immaculate deception, he nonetheless remains a campaign fixture designed to give the out-of-touch multimillionaire McCain working class credibility. Featured in debates, speeches, campaign ads and now on Fox News, Wurzelbacher is a flesh and blood symbol used to create the facade of McCain's affinity with working Americans. And as the McCain campaign's red-baiting rants about "welfare" and "socialism" intensify, the mythical Joe will serve as a rhetorical bludgeon against Barack Obama.
Wurzelbacher isn't the only human shield McCain has deployed to fend off charges he is out of touch and out of ideas on the economy. Early on, McCain turned to former eBay CEO Meg Whitman to erase voters' concerns about his admitted economic ignorance. Using virtually identical language as Whitman, McCain cited her online auction site ("1.3 million people in the world make a living off eBay, most of those are in the United State of America") as the solution to recession and poverty in the U.S. In August, McCain said she was one the three wisest people he knew whose counsel he would depend on. By the second presidential debate, he named Whitman as a possible Treasury Secretary. (Unfortunately, McCain's case of premature elevation came literally the day after his economic engine eBay announced it was laying off 10% of its workers.)
Of course, no one better illustrates McCain's use of the human battering ram than General David Petraeus. Petraeus' name has become a one-word antidote to McCain's fatally flawed record on Iraq that includes predictions of an easy victory, declarations of mission accomplished, confidence over the presence of WMD, confusion over Sunni and Shiite among an endless stream of errors. McCain has even appropriated the term "surge" itself to describe his approaches to the economy and Afghanistan (an analogy, by the way, Petraeus himself rejects). No surprise, Petraeus joined Whitman on John McCain's list of the "three wisest people that you know" at Pastor Rick Warren's Saddleback Forum.
As McCain showed at that same event, he's not shy about conscripting protectors against their will. No doubt hoping to deflect criticism over both his past opposition to the Martin Luther King holiday and the dismal record civil rights record of his Republican Party, McCain told Warren that his third wise man was Democratic Congressman John Lewis. That came as news to Lewis, who noted:

"Senator McCain and I are colleagues in the U.S. Congress, not confidantes. He does not consult me. And I do not consult him."

When Lewis called out McCain over his race-baiting campaign last week, McCain repudiated him. Like another former human shield Carly Fiorina, Lewis had apparently lost his protective power for John McCain and so was cast aside.
The former head of HP, Fiorina for a time was the face of John McCain's outreach to disappointed supporters of Hillary Clinton. By consistently misrepresenting McCain's radical views on abortion, contraception, equal pay and other women's issues, Fiorina produced a smokescreen on McCain's behalf. But when her repeated departures from campaign talking points - and her $42 million golden parachute from HP - became problematic, Fiorina was consigned to surrogate purgatory.
As it turns out, McCain's human screens don't merely serve to inoculate him from political attacks. They also can keep him at a safe distance while they do his dirty work for him. McCain, after all, refused to denounce Virginia GOP chairman Jeffrey Frederick for comparing Barack Obama to Osama Bin Laden. Instead, he will attend a Republican rally with Frederick. And last when a woman at one his events called Hillary Clinton "the bitch," McCain laughed and called hers an "excellent question." Adding insult to injury, the McCain campaign used the episode to raise money from its Hillary-hating followers.
At the end of the day, McCain's greatest shield is his own status as a prisoner of war. While his Vietnam War heroism and sacrifice for his country should always be honored by all Americans, his uses and misuses of the POW card rank among the saddest moments of his campaign's ongoing descent into the gutter.
And so it goes. Battered by the mushrooming economic crisis and down in the polls, John McCain badly needs to project a face of compassion and concern for the plight of working Americans. As the meteoric rise of Joe the Plumber again shows, it will be someone else's face.