And I should also add that Palin was there before Trump in how she viewed the journalists who covered her. And I've often thought about how her instant celebrity, her sassiness, her often-fraught relationship with the truth previewed what would hit with even greater political force in Donald Trump eight years later. And I remember her name being pronounced mostly incorrectly on the bus - Pah-lin (ph), people were saying. We knew she was Alaska's governor, but not much more about her. GONYEA: I was on an Obama campaign bus when that news broke.
This was the day the Republican nominee, John McCain, named her as his running mate. And the other one is that this was the day most Americans heard the name Sarah Palin for the first time. Well, I said at the top that there were two milestones reminding us of 2008. But it is not a stretch at all to say that Joe the Plumber gave us a preview of all of that that would play out two years later. It would rise up as a force in the first two years of Obama's presidency when Tea Party candidates ran for Congress and for local offices in the 2010 midterms. But at that moment in 2008, no one had yet heard of the Tea Party. SHAPIRO: Which sounds so much like what we went on to see with the Tea Party movement, the same sorts of complaints about taxes and government. GONYEA: And within days, Ari, Joe the Plumber was out on the campaign trail with McCain trumpeting an anti-tax message. JOHN MCCAIN: Why would you want to increase anybody's taxes right now? Why would you want to do that? - anyone, anyone in America, when we have such a tough time when these small businesspeople like Joe the Plumber are going to create jobs unless you take that money from him and spread the wealth around. Then, just days later, there was a presidential debate with GOP nominee John McCain repeatedly attacking Obama by citing Joe the Plumber. It was one of those moments that just happens out of the blue. He told Obama he wanted to buy the plumbing company he worked for, but he became an instant stand-in for working-class Americans terrified over the state of the economy and the financial crisis. And these things, these moments take up residence in the nooks and crannies of your memory, including, in this case, Joe the Plumber.
GONYEA: It just becomes so much a part of you. SHAPIRO: What are your memories of that moment and what it meant at the time? His legacy showed the power people have in politics, something NPR's Don Gonyea saw firsthand as he covered the 2008 campaign. Joe the Plumber died this week from pancreatic cancer. He personified working-class America on the campaign trail. SHAPIRO: That's Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher, who became known as Joe the Plumber, after that exchange with then-candidate Barack Obama.
You know, I work, you know, 10, 12 hours a day. SAMUEL JOSEPH WURZELBACHER: Well, the reason why I asked you about the American dream - I mean, I worked hard. The first milestone involves a viral moment. Although we are in the 2024 campaign cycle, two milestones this week got us looking back to the presidential campaign of 2008, when Senator Barack Obama first won the White House.
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