By William Hershey
COLUMBUS, OHIO — Joe’s familiar to most Americans by now. He’s Republican John McCain’s best friend and campaign sidekick.
Joe — actually Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher — met up with Democrat Barack Obama in suburban Toledo last month and bashed Obama’s tax plan. Wurzelbacher believes it would hurt his chances to buy the plumbing business he works for.
Joe’s aspirations to become a small business owner represent an important part of America’s story.
Business people who started out with less than Joe have created millions of jobs, made themselves rich and helped make the United States the economic envy of the world, even in these down times.
Democrats don’t agree with Joe’s analysis of Obama’s and McCain’s tax plans but if they’re smart they won’t beat up on his dream.
Abraham also represents a part of the American story, a part that probably doesn’t get talked about enough in the onslaught of attack ads and celebrity get-out-the-vote rockfests that dominate the campaign for president.
It’s a part that immigrants like Abraham, who came here from Ethiopia in January 1982, with literally nothing but the clothes on his back, can see clearer than the rest of us — the power to change things by voting.
I know Abraham — Abraham Beyene — better than Joe. He was my student 40 years ago in an Ethiopia high school when I was a Peace Corps teacher.
My wife and I along with two churches helped bring him to Ohio from Sudan. He had fled there on foot after fighting in Ethiopia’s bloody civil struggles that erupted after Emperor Haile Selassie was deposed in 1974.
After graduating from Ohio State in 1987, Abraham moved to the Atlanta area. Like Joe, he looked for better economic opportunities. He landed a job with a land development company but when hard times hit and he was laid off, he started driving a taxi.
These days, he’s still driving and also helping his wife Tirue raise their son, Bruck, 15, and daughter Seday, 12. The family’s day starts at 3:30 a.m. when Tirue gets up for her job at a grocery store bakery. Abraham drives the kids to school and then heads to the airport to pick up some fares.
He’s taken a separate job this year — registering voters. He registered some at an Ethiopian festival and then took more forms to the airport where he signed up about 29 taxi drivers. Like him, most were immigrants — Ethiopians, Somalis, Pakistanis, Indians and Iranians.
“If any American doesn’t see any country outside of his own nation, then he wouldn’t take the voting rights seriously,” Abraham said. “To people like me who have been deprived of those rights or people like South Africans who sacrificed their lives to get voting power, it means a lot.”
He tells his son Bruck that voting matters.
“All your life is affected by elected officials, your gas bill, your mortgage, your water bill, your electric bill, the schools, the day care centers, the health system,” Abraham said.
He supports Obama for president but backed Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primary, partly because of her husband Bill.
“I bought my house during this period of his presidency. I had good money. The economy was good. The country was at peace. The guy was for the middle class and the lower class,” he said.
Also, he didn’t think American voters were ready to pick a black man like Obama to run for president.
“The outcome changed my mind,” he said. “He (Obama) defeated all the odds.”
Obama’s a long shot in Georgia, but Abraham is not deterred.
“There’s no perfection in the world,” he said. “Things are relative.”