Silvio the Plumber

A column I wrote appeared in the October 29^th (2008) edition of the Greenwich Time and the Advocate (Stamford, CT) but is not yet on their websites.  Here are excerpts.  The full column can be read by clicking here.

Long before Joe the Plumber was on the political scene, there was Silvio the Plumber, and were he alive he would be voting for Obama. (And if half of the ACORN voter registration fraud stories are true, he very well may be!)

Silvio the Plumber is the first character a reader meets in the 1996 Pulitzer Prize finalist non-fiction The Inheritance: How Three Families and the American Political Majority Moved from Left to Right by New York Times columnist Samuel G. Freedman. (Simon & Schuster),

The book traces the evolution of that group of Catholic ethnics the pundits called Reagan Democrats through the stories of three families over the course of three generations. In it we are introduced to Silvio in his pre-plumber days, in 1918, when at the age of 15 he had to drop out of school to help support the family who had taken him in. Silvio’s father, owner of a construction company, had committed suicide years before, when in the wake of the economic panic of 1907, he lost his youngest son, his life savings and his house. The final straw was being unable to meet payroll.

[S]ilvio believed relief was for those less able-bodied than he. For his part, WPA, the “workfare” of his day, was Silvio’s answer. While “workfare” may be a Republican concept, Silvio the Plumber was not a Republican. He was a proud life-long New Dealer, a union leader for whom the local union hall was named, and a man who could count on one finger the number of Republicans he voted for. Not so, Lorraine.

As his daughter Lorraine the Telephone Operator, became Lorraine the Wife and Working-Mother, the Democrat (as she called it) party was changing too. … Lorraine was part of the first wave of what was to be called the Reagan Democrats. Worse yet in the eyes of Silvio the Plumber, Lorraine’s first-born was a young non-com in the Reagan Revolutionary militia – a Republican enlistee.

So, what would Silvio the Plumber say about the 2008 Presidential election?

Find out by clicking here.

Silvio the Plumber, my grandfather, would probably groan, shake his head in disgust and walk away — sometime later thinking “Damn kid could be right.” But, he would (regrettably) vote for Obama.