Sarah Palin, Tito the Builder, and Me

I have a cameo appearance in an important scene in the Palin book. Guess what? She didn’t get it exactly right.

Photo used under Creative Commons license by Flickr user <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/lifeisaprayer/">geerlingguy</a>.

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


Well, I guess I’ve made it. Sort of. In Sarah Palin’s book, Going Rogue, I have a cameo appearance on page 305. I learned of this not by reading the book—just haven’t gotten around to it yet—but because Slate produced a tongue-in-cheek (but real) index for the index-free book. I’m listed under “haters, unnamed”—along with Andrew Sullivan and Ashley Judd. (“Haters, named” includes two Alaska-based critics of Palin—blogger Andrew Halcro and self-styled reform watchdog Andree Mcleod—and the Huffington Post.)

What drew me into Palin World was an encounter I had with a McCain-Palin supporter after a campaign rally in Virginia for John McCain two weeks before the 2008 presidential election. This fellow named Tito Munoz, who came to be known as Tito the Builder, was angry about press coverage of Joe Wurzelbacher, aka Joe the Plumber. A week earlier, Wurzelbacher had become a player in the campaign after questioning Barack Obama about his tax plan and suggesting Obama’s policies could prevent him from buying the plumbing company he worked for.

In the intervening days, news reports had noted that Wurzelbacher had not registered to operate as a plumber, that he did not make enough money to acquire the plumbing business where he was employed, that he had not paid $1,182 in Ohio state income taxes, and that he would actually pay less in taxes under Obama’s proposed tax plan than under McCain’s. In her book, Palin says that she liked Wurzelbacher and that “our campaign quickly realized” that he “typified the everyday American laborer who…ought not to be punished by oppressive tax policies.”

Palin accurately reports that Munoz, wearing a yellow hard hat and orange reflective vest, had come to that Virginia rally “mad as hell” at the media for having raised questions about Wurzelbacher. And she accurately notes—here’s where I come in—that a “left-wing reporter from the magazine Mother Jones told Tito he didn’t see anything wrong with the press coverage.” That exchange was part of a feisty conversation between me, Munoz, and several other McCain-Palin supporters.  (You can watch it here or below.)

Palin and her cowriter, though, provide a skewed account. They note that a woman in the crowd, treating me as a representative of the entire news media, yelled, “Why is it that you can go and find out about Joe the Plumber’s tax lien and when he divorced his wife and you can’t tell me when Barack Obama met with William Ayers [the 1960s Weather Underground radical]? Why? Why could you not tell us that? Joe the Plumber is me!” And in Palin’s account, Munoz piped up: “I am Joe the Plumber. You’re attacking me.”

What Palin leaves out is that as Munoz continued to complain that the media was not reporting on Obama’s past, I pointed out to him that the most comprehensive article to date on Obama’s relationship with Ayers was a long piece that had recently appeared in The New York Times, the ground zero of the liberal media conspiracy. Palin also neglected to note that when I told Munoz and his fellow McCainiacs that nonpartisan tax policy experts had concluded that Obama’s tax plan would impose lower taxes on Americans making below $200,000 a year than McCain’s proposal, Munoz and the others jeered, with one shouting, “Do you believe everything you read?” This was an indication that Munoz and his comrades were not in the mood for facts. And moments later—during another part of the conversation Palin does not chronicle—Munoz, referring to Obama, shouted, “Socialist, socialist!” (By the way, Munoz owns a construction company that has received a loan from the Small Business Administration and that has been registered as minority-owned in order to receive what some conservatives might call “affirmative-action” federal contracts.)

In writing about Munoz, Palin hails him as something of an American hero. She recalls that her campaign jumped at the chance to have him introduce her at a subsequent rally. But in her book, she really uses him—and my encounter with him—to demonstrate that she had the guts to go after Obama in a way McCain did not:

Tito the Builder sounded like the kind of guy who wasn’t going to be told to sit down and shut up, something I’d basically been told to do when I spoke on the trail about Obama’s associations with questionable characters, including Obama’s long association with Bill Ayers.

Palin recalls that McCain campaign headquarters approved an Ayers-related soundbite for her to use: Obama’s “palling around with terrorists.” But after media commentators accused her of playing down-and-dirty politics, she grouses, “the folks there [at the McCain campaign] did little more than duck.” Yet Palin notes that not only was she willing to continue this line of attack, she was eager to slam Obama for his relationship with “Jeremiah ‘God Damn America’ Wright.” She writes, “I will forever question the campaign for prohibiting discussions of such associations.”

Palin, no surprise, is unrepentant about her attempt to brand Obama as a pal-to-terrorists. And she’s using Munoz to back her up, implying that he knew better than those wimpy McCain campaign strategists. If Palin does decide to run for president in 2012, perhaps she can bring Munoz aboard as Tito the Adviser.

You can follow David Corn’s postings and media appearances via Twitter.

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate