Joe Wurzelbacher or "Joe the Plumber" passed away at the age of 49 due to pancreatic cancer.
He became famous when he asked a tax question to Barack Hussein Obama on the latters 2008 campaign trail.
His tax policy question was if Obama would tax him more for the success of him potentially founding his own small business and went viral back then. Nicknamed Joe the Plumber, he was soon invited to promote the Republican John McCain's Presidential Campaign and was referenced heavily in the ensuing debates and campaign discussion, becoming a highly recognized figure and figurehead so to speak as well as doing a large number of media appearances both on his own and as part of the McCain Campaign.
Also interestingly, there was a scandal when some of his private government records were released by Democratic aligned Ohio State public service workers to the media to discredit him which also got national attention. After initial denials that searches for his personal records had nothing to do with his initial celebrity and a failed coverup,
eventually resulted in the resigniations of multiple government employees.
After the 2008 Campaign he spent some time as a journalist for some right wing oriented news outlets like PJ Media as well as an author and public speaker. He attempted his own Congressional Run in 2012 but was unsuccessful. Perhaps most random of all,
he was hired to speak in videos about the transition of television signals to a digital or DTV format back in 2008, perhaps due to his recognizable blue collar popularity at the time.
He supported Donald Trump in 2016.
"Joe the Plumber,” the Ohio workingman who came to symbolize U.S. taxpayer frustration in the 2008 presidential election, is still angry. And like many angry voters, he likes insurgent Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump — in part because the New York billionaire...
www.reuters.com
He's survived by his wife and four kids (from two marriages).
Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher, who became known as “Joe the Plumber” after garnering national media attention for confronting then-presidential candidate Barack Obama on the 2008 campaign …
nypost.com