Composite image by POLITICO McCain allies prefer plumber to Powell

John McCain’s surrogates took to the Sunday shows to minimize the damage from Colin Powell’s endorsement of Democrat Barack Obama and challenge the hardening conventional wisdom that the presidential race is slipping away from their candidate.

House Republican Whip Roy Blunt of Missouri admitted he wished Powell would have endorsed McCain, but said that neither the endorsement nor Obama’s association with 1960s radical Bill Ayers will matter as much as Joe the plumber.


“I think Joe the plumber does matter here, not because he's Joe or not because he's a plumber but because of all that particular discussion represents,” Blunt said on CNN’s "Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer."

“Endorsements are typically overrated, I think,” former Bush budget director Rob Portman said on CBS’ "Face the Nation." “I don't think it makes a big difference,” Portman told host Bob Schieffer, though he added that Powell “is well respected” and has said Powell “respects both men but he's always had a special admiration for Sen. Obama.”

Missouri’s Republican Gov. Matt Blunt told Schieffer, “I don't know that it will make a difference in Missouri,” and he downplayed the record 100,000-person crowd Obama drew Saturday in St. Louis.

“He obviously has a great celebrity status,” Blunt said of the Illinois senator. “That doesn't always translate into votes.”

Powell got it wrong when he called Obama “transformational,” Rudy Giuliani said on “Late Edition.”

“I don't see the same things in Barack Obama that Colin Powell sees,” said the former New York mayor, who acknowledged he has “the highest regard” for Powell and wanted him to seek the GOP presidential nomination in 1996.

“What I see [in Obama] is a very traditional liberal Democrat, really a throwback — even a throwback before the Clintons, Giuliani said, charging that Obama would engineer a government takeover of health care and strip workers’ rights to secret ballots in union elections.

On the other side of the Sunday show aisle, Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine, a Democrat, told CBS’s Schieffer that Powell’s endorsement proves that Obama will be able to set aside partisan ideology to forge pragmatic solutions and said it validates Obama's national security judgment.

“Gen. Powell is not seen as a dividing figure but a uniting figure,” Kaine said, adding that “to have the confidence of Gen. Powell in this election is very important.”

Democratic strategist Donna Brazile said on ABC’s “This Week with George Stephanopoulos” that Powell’s endorsement of Obama should “erase any remaining doubts about his national security agenda [and] his experience.”

Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) a top Obama surrogate, said Powell’s endorsement repudiates McCain’s efforts to link Obama to Ayers’ bombings in the 1960s.

“Does anybody in their right mind think that Gen. Powell would ever endorse anyone that had any patience with terrorists?" McCaskill said on "Late Edition." "Of course he wouldn't.”

She got backup from some unlikely quarters. Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich of Georgia, a Republican luminary, agreed with Brazile that the endorsement “eliminated the experience argument. How are you going to say the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs, former secretary of state, former national security adviser, was taken in?”

Former presidential adviser David Gergen, also on “This Week,” called Powell’s “the most important endorsement of the campaign so far.”

Gingrich attributed Obama’s growing cash advantage — the campaign announced Sunday it had raised $150 million in September — to the McCain-authored 2002 campaign finance overhaul (which actually did not change the public financing system limiting the Arizona senator to $84 million for the general election), calling it a “bizarre irony” and predicting it may be too much for McCain to overcome.

“If nothing changes, Sen. Obama is going to win,” Gingrich said, asserting that McCain’s only chance is to seize on Obama’s much-ballyhooed comments last week to the Ohio plumber who confronted him while canvassing demanding to know if Obama believed “in the American Dream.”

Obama told the plumber, Joe Wurzelbacher, that “when you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody.”

Americans favor focusing on job growth over redistribution by 84 percent to 14 percent, Gingrich said, asserting “even with no resources, a presidential candidate ought to be able to take an 84 to 14 issue —as Reagan would have — stay on it for two weeks” and reshape the election.

That message is already resonating in the critical swing state of Ohio, which Portman, a former Ohio congressman, predicted would be tight.

“John McCain has, really, a very simple message now, which is that, for the economy, Barack Obama is going to be risky,” Portman said on CBS. “Joe the plumber kind of put the face on it, but the fact is, there are plumbing contractors, there are restaurant owners, there are small manufacturers, there are small software companies all around this beautiful Ohio state, who are saying: ‘Look, I'm having a hard time keeping the employees I have. I want to add more employees. Don't tax me,’” Portman said.

Kaine challenged Portman’s portrayal, saying that “the Joe the plumbers of the world are going to do much better under Sen. Obama as president than Sen. McCain.”