JOE WURZELBACHER last week was a plumber in Toledo, Ohio, unknown to most outside his Springfield township home. Today, he has become one of the best-known men in the US, if only temporarily, writes Mark Hennessyin Washington.
Yesterday the shaven-headed 34-year-old spent much of his time dealing with queries from US media, following John McCain's mention of him in Wednesday night's final presidential debate.
On Sunday, the father-of-one approached Barack Obama at a rally in Holland, Ohio, to challenge the Democratic candidate's tax plans - which Obama says will cut bills for 95 per cent of US workers.
Replying then, Obama, whose plans would seek more tax from firms with more than $250,000 profits, said he wanted "to spread the wealth around" - a notion that was seized on by right-wing commentators such as Ross Limbaugh. Unconvinced, the Toledo man, who wants to buy the plumbing business in which he has worked for a decade, disagreed, arguing that the Democrat's ideas would cost him his shot at the American dream.
Later he said: "He does want to punish me; he does want to punish me for working harder. My big thing is the American dream. I work hard. You know, I was poor; my mom raised me and my brother by herself for a very long time until my dad came along.
"So I know what it's like to suffer. It's not like I was born with a silver spoon. Usually it was a wooden spoon, and it was on my butt. I mean, just to sound a little silly here, you need rich people. I mean, who are you going to work for? "
In the TV debate, McCain told Obama: "Joe wants to buy the business that he has been in for all of these years, worked 10, 12 hours a day. And he wanted to buy the business, but he looked at your tax plan and he saw that he was going to pay much higher taxes."
Immediately dubbed "Joe the Plumber", Wurzelbacher, who was mentioned 23 times by the candidates, enjoyed that other element of the American dream once identified by Andy Warhol - 15 minutes of fame.
Within minutes, media stars such as ABC's Katie Couric hurried to have him on their shows; CNN, Fox News, CNBC, the Wall Street Journaland the BBC all rang, interrupting him and his father's attempts to watch the debate.
In line with the campaign's increasingly partisan nature, the Republican-leaning plumber quickly became the target of Democratic-supporting media and bloggers, who cast doubt on whether he had registered to vote. So far, it appears that he has. His local county board of elections said a Samuel Joseph Worzelbacher, whose address and age match, even if the surname is spelt differently, had registered in 1992, but only voted in his first primary in March this year.
Initially, Wurzelbacher was just a shade embarrassed, and keen to emphasise that his vote was still in play: "There's a lot more important issues than me. Everyone's more worried about what Joe the Plumber has to say than what Obama or McCain has to say." By yesterday morning he was more comfortable with his new-found fame, as he told Good Morning America'sDiane Sawyer: "It floored me. It's not something I expected ever. My son is digging it. It's kind of neat."
The plumber whose encounter with Obama became a Youtube video within hours, did not give TV interviews immediately. Instead, he struggled to fix a water main break at a filling station. "I was muddy and soaking wet," he said.
Following the heights of Good Morning Americayesterday, he hoped to deal with a few emergency calls before day's end. John McCain's decision to identify him by name in front of 80 million Americans would, he hoped, be good for the business that he hopes to buy.