Jack the Plumber has a word for Joe

Here in Nevada, Jack the Plumber has a message for Joe the Plumber: What's wrong with taxes?

"I personally would like to make a sign that says, 'I am Jack the Plumber, and I'll be more than delighted to pay a little bit more if I make more than $250,000 a year,'" said Jack Ramjeeawon, 61, who owns Jack Dish Plumbing in Henderson with his two adult sons.

"It's very important to us to give back to the community that has given to us," said Ramjeeawon, who said the business makes just under the $250,000 income threshold above which Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama admits he will raise people's taxes.

"I don't need a quarter million to live a whole year," he said. "Many people are living on minimum wage and struggling to put food on the table. If I make a quarter million, why should I not give a little more to the society that is supporting me?"

Joe the Plumber, aka Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher of Toledo, Ohio, became the central symbol of Republican nominee John McCain's campaign last week. McCain invoked "Joe the Plumber" 20 times in the final presidential debate to paint Obama as a tax-hiker who would stifle private enterprise. Obama had told Joe, whom he met at a campaign stop, that he wanted to "spread the wealth around," which McCain has called "socialist."

Analysis has revealed that Obama, like McCain, plans to reduce Wurzelbacher's tax burden and that Wurzelbacher doesn't have a plumbing license. Meanwhile, both sides have continued to invoke his name: He was called "Jose el plomero" at a GOP rally in Miami.

Ramjeeawon, an immigrant from the African island of Mauritius who has been in the plumbing business for 30 years, said the American dream to him is "not about how much I have in my bank account; it's about living in a society where I can contribute and we can work together. My view is that we can't be greedy. We are a society of compassion."

He voted for President Bush in 2000, but now Ramjeeawon is a Democrat who plans to vote for Barack Obama. And yes, people really do call him Jack the Plumber.

ROVE: NEVADA STILL IN PLAY

According to Karl Rove, Nevada is one of just five remaining swing states.

The onetime Bush strategist's latest electoral vote map, released Friday, shows every state colored red or blue except Nevada, North Dakota, Missouri, Ohio and North Carolina.

Florida, Colorado and New Mexico, with nearly every other erstwhile swing state, is blue. Rove, who bases his map on polling averages, tallies 313 electoral votes for Obama and 171 for McCain. It takes 270 to win.

That doesn't mean Rove believes the election is over; he recently wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal titled "Obama Hasn't Closed the Sale." But it illustrates that in an electoral map trending the Democrats' way at this moment in time, Nevada -- where Rove grew up -- remains one of the last wild cards standing.

New Nevada polls show Obama narrowly ahead. A Rasmussen poll released Thursday had Obama earning 50 percent of the vote to McCain's 45 percent. The poll of 700 likely voters carried a margin of error of plus or minus 4 percentage points. Two weeks earlier, Rasmussen had Obama at 51 percent and McCain at 47 percent.

Rasmussen also found the congressional bailout plan wildly unpopular in Nevada, where 19 percent of those polled supported it and 59 percent were against it. Voters were divided, 26 percent to 27 percent, on whether the rescue would help or hurt the economy, with 29 percent saying it would have no effect.

Thirty-nine percent of those polled believed Obama to be running a positive campaign, versus 14 percent who said McCain is doing so. The majority, 51 percent, thought the Republican was running a negative campaign, versus 31 percent who said that about the Democrat.

Earlier in the week, an InsiderAdvantage poll of the state had Obama up three points, 49-46; a Zogby Internet poll had him up one, 48-47; and a survey by the local firm Magellan Research also put him ahead by three, 47-44.

The Web site FiveThirtyEight.com, which attempts to project election results by weighting polls and running simulations, has Obama winning the state by 2.8 points. Bush won by 2.6 points in 2004.

BANDWAGON HOPPERS

Nevada's two U.S. senators are hopping on the renewable bandwagon.

Republican John Ensign said in an interview with the Review-Journal editorial board last week that he is installing solar power at his home in Las Vegas.

"I'm a big believer in renewable energy," Ensign said. "I'm going to do solar at my house." He touted his own work in Congress expanding the federal tax credit for such an endeavor.

"I called NV Energy to find out more, and I found out that Senator (Harry) Reid had just called a day or two before," Ensign said. "He's going to do wind and solar."

A spokesman for Reid, the Democratic leader, confirmed that he is planning a wind project for his home in Searchlight.

It was noted, in the Ensign interview, that he had missed an obvious opening for a jab at Reid about how much more wind Democrats must have at their disposal.

Ensign, who maintains a mutual nonaggression pact with Reid in the interest of advancing Nevada's interests despite their widely differing political philosophies, said with a straight face that the wind does, in fact, blow more at higher elevations, like Searchlight.

MAILERS NOT TO BE BELIEVED

The hits just keep on coming from the state Democratic Party. A couple of recent fliers from the party in legislative races make claims about Republican candidates that are not to be believed.

Perhaps tacitly acknowledging that they aren't even interested in attempting to assert their messages have a basis in fact anymore, party representatives did not return phone and e-mail messages seeking answers about the mailers.

One mailer asserts that Donna Toussaint, the Republican running in Assembly District 5, "Opposes Health Care for Nevada's Uninsured Kids. That's a Dangerous Gamble." The front of the flier amplifies this theme with a photo of a roulette wheel.

The flier says, "There are 115,000 Nevada kids without health care and Donna Toussaint doesn't seem to care. Donna Toussaint wants to help an agenda that includes saying 'No' to SCHIP, the children's health insurance program."

These two statements are appended with little asterisks to give them the appearance of sourcing. But the sources are www.statehealthfacts.org, which gives the statistic for the number of uninsured children, and "HR 976, 2007," the bill in the U.S. House of Representatives last year that expanded SCHIP.

Not only was Toussaint not in Congress to vote for or against that bill, she has never held elected office or voiced an opinion on that legislation, which received bipartisan support. Nor would she be in a position to take stands on federal legislation if elected to the Assembly.

Across town in Political Notebook's own Assembly District 29, Republican Sean Fellows is said to favor corporations over working people in a couple of similar mailers.

One bases that assertion on the statement, "Fellows' wife is part of a lobbying group that represents more than 80 special interests and corporations, and Fellows wants to take away consumers' ability to hold corporations accountable for shoddy and dangerous work."

Again, sources are provided to give the veneer of fact. They point to the list of legislative lobbyists and the Jones Vargas Web site.

It's true that Kathleen Fellows is a lawyer at Jones Vargas and that the firm is one of Carson City's most powerful lobbying shops. However, she is not herself a state lobbyist, and her husband's views on corporate accountability, presumably a reference to tort reform, are unsourced.

These are hardly the most scurrilous, nasty or lie-filled pieces of political advertising Political Notebook has seen. But by making the fliers ostensibly about issues and providing footnotes, they appear to be trying to present themselves as the more believable kind.

Contact political reporter Molly Ball at 387-2919 or MBall@reviewjournal.com.