Mike Rowe - host of the TV show Dirty Jobs - has endorsed Mitt Romney for president (link). Whether he'll go as far as being this election cycle's Joe The Plumber or Tito The Builder remains to be seen.

In any case, this is a big mistake on his part for various reasons:

1. Romney isn't going to win: Rowe is hitching his wagon to a falling star.

2. The GOP is frequently openly hostile to the interests of those who aren't rich and to lower-skilled workers specifically. Millions of the 47% of all Americans that Mitt Romney turned his back on are lower-skilled workers: the working poor or close to it.

3. This won't exactly endear Rowe to somewhere around half of his audience.

That doesn't mean that the Democratic Party is any better. The better option for Rowe would have been to hold himself out to both sides - but not commit to either - in order to wring out concessions that match what I assume to be his agenda.

For instance, he could point out how Romney's "47%" comments are wrong, and likewise with all the many other things various GOP representatives have said. Showing libertarians wrong is child's play and the closer the GOP gets to libertarian ideology, the easier showing them wrong becomes.

At the same time, Rowe could point out that Obama's amnesty will harm American workers (most of them Democrats) and he could push my 3+ year old plan to get jobs for able-bodied unemployed workers near growing regions.

Rowe could push both the GOP and the Democrats to adopt plans more friendly to U.S. manufacturing rather than offshoring and outsourcing.

On his site, Rowe says (link):

In [my appearances on news shows, etc.], I shared my theory that most of these "problems" were in fact symptoms of something more fundamental – a change in the way Americans viewed hard work and skilled labor. That’s the essence of what I've heard from the hundreds of men and women I've worked with on Dirty Jobs. Pig farmers, electricians, plumbers, bridge painters, jam makers, blacksmiths, brewers, coal miners, carpenters, crab fisherman, oil drillers... they all tell me the same thing over and over, again and again – our country has become emotionally disconnected from an essential part of our workforce. We are no longer impressed with cheap electricity, paved roads, and indoor plumbing. We take our infrastructure for granted, and the people who build it.

That disconnect is a cultural problem that originated in the elites: those who are able to promote policies that enrich themselves at everyone else's expense. That cultural problem has to be confronted by discrediting those elites and forcing them to promote better policies. Simply joining with one head of the hydra rather than the other isn't going to fix much of anything, unless Rowe simply wants to become this year's Joe the Plumber.