International Herald Tribune

Gail Collins did another awesome op-ed about, Is Anybody Happy? She covered everything from George Bush’s speech on Friday to the fatal mistake made by McCain in using “Joe the Plumber” as the centerpiece, in the final days of his campaign. These are the excerpts that I found most noteworthy, also her lessons to be learned are too funny.

First of all, George W. Bush showed up on TV Friday morning to reassure Americans. What could possibly be worse? Everybody knows that anything the U.S. president says is very likely wrong, and certainly won’t happen. If he announced: “I’m sending government agents to Spokane to arrest the looters,” we would expect that the officials would get lost, nobody would be arrested, and the looters probably never existed in the first place.

So hearts sunk throughout the United States when Bush appeared at a Chamber of Commerce gathering to say that the economy would recover.

“America is the most attractive destination for investors around the globe. America is the home of the most talented and enterprising and creative workers in the world,” said the president, who also insisted that “democratic capitalism remains the greatest system ever devised.”

Which translates into: All the money is going to Asia, nobody will ever get a job again and Karl Marx was right after all. Bummer.

The Republicans are deeply depressed. Only Sarah Palin is chipper, perhaps because, as she told her supporters, the staff won’t let her watch the news. Maybe McCain’s problem is not his temperament but his positions. It’s hard to be cheerful and self-satisfied when you’re peddling an unpopular product.

With less than three weeks to go, saddled with an unpopular ideology and an unattractive candidate, the McCain campaign’s deep thinkers decided the only possible hope was . … Joe the Plumber! Joe is, of course, the conservative guy from northwestern Ohio who told Obama: “Your new tax plan is going to tax me more” because he planned to buy a business that he hoped would reel in more than $250,000 a year in profits.

The Republican presidential campaign is now all Joe, all the time. Obama’s plan to give tax breaks to people making less than $200,000 a year is being described on a McCain Internet ad as “welfare government handouts.” In Miami, Lieberman told a rally that McCain would “fight for Jose el plomero!”