Joe the Plumber comes to the rescue

The only major bump in the road during President Barack Obamas march to the oval office occurred on Sunday, Oct. 15, 2008 when candidate Obama, campaigning in Ohio ran into one Joe Wurzelbacher, AKA "Joe the Plumber." When Joe asked Obama about his plan to raise taxes on people making more than $250,000 a year, he told Joe "that when you spread the wealth around it is good for everybody."

Joe became an instant celebrity and a target for Obama campaign supporters. The Main Street media spent more time digging up dirt on Joe than they did on Reverend Wright. His 15 minutes of fame came with a price as he was ripped to shreds on TV and in the print media.

The Presidents National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Spill and Offshore Drilling is made up of some of the leading experts in the country including Dr. Cherry A. Murray, dean of the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Science. The government has sought the advice of some of the countrys best scientists, some of whom have won Nobel Prizes. BP has searched the world looking to hire any egghead who could plug the leak. So who came up with the fix that looks to be working?

If media reports are true, it was Joe Caldart of St Francis, Kansas who designed the cap that has stopped the leak. Though Joe is no PH.D. and not an engineer it seems, he is an expert on leaks.

He is a plumber.

Over 300,000 tips on how to fix the leak and expedite the cleanout have poured into BP. Tipsters included Hollywood giants Kevin Costner and James Cameron and thousands of scientists, professors and as we know now, one plumber.

Caldarts sketches of his containment dome were sent to BP on May 25 and ignored. Frustrated that he had the fix but no one would listen, he began e-mailing University of California petroleum engineer, Robert Bea. Bea was able to get BP to take a hard look at his design.

Dr. Bea said this about Joes design. "The idea was using the top flange on the blowout preventer as an attachment point and then employing an internal seal against the flange surface. You can see how a plumber thinks this way. That is how they have to plumb for sewage."

If the fix had been employed back in May, BP and the U.S. government could have saved billions of dollars, and damage to the Gulf environment would have been much less. Sometimes solutions to major problems are so basic that it takes an ordinary person to come up with the answer.

The original "Joe the Plumber" almost sunk the Obama campaign. This "Joe the Plumber" may have saved his presidency. Will Caldart be named the new national Plumbing Czar? It seems he has done more than a lot of the other Czars that shuffle around the White House. He deserves to be named at least Plumber in Chief.

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Joe the Plumber comes to the rescue