Clinton accuses Obama of plagiarising speech

She's been waiting for Obama to make a mistake for weeks now, indeed, she's been calling him "chicken" for refusing to take part in extra debates in the very hope that he will commit a slip-up.

Now she thinks she has caught him in a gaffe, and Clinton has gone for the kill:

Yesterday, the Clinton campaign noted that Obama lifted a key passage of his speech defending the power of oratory from the Democratic governor of Massachusetts, Deval Patrick.

"Don't tell me words don't matter," Obama said in his speech. "'I have a dream' - just words? 'We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal' - just words? 'We have nothing to fear but fear itself' - just words? Just speeches?"

The passage was borrowed verbatim from a 2006 speech by Patrick and available on YouTube.

Although the Clinton campaign was unable to provide proof of systematic borrowing by Obama, they said it called into question his entire campaign, which has been based, in part, on soaring speeches.

"It raises questions about the premise of his candidacy," Howard Wolfson, Clinton's spokesman, told reporters in a conference call. Campaign aides also accused Obama of copying Clinton's economic plan, which she released as a 13-page booklet yesterday.

Obama admitted yesterday that he should have credited Patrick, who campaigned for him in Massachusetts and has also worked with the political consultant David Axelrod. But he insisted that most of the words were his own. "Look here, I've written two books. Wrote most of my speeches," he told reporters in Ohio. "Deval and I do trade ideas all the time, and, you know, he's occasionally used lines of mine."

He went on to accuse Clinton of stealing some of his lines.

Now I know the Clinton campaign have attempted to write off Obama's entire campaign as "just words" and have hinted that beyond the soaring rhetoric there is really nothing else, and it is only if one accepts that premise that this becomes a huge deal. The debate, as defined by Clinton, is about whether or not words matter. Obama came back with a strong answer. Whether or not he was the first person ever to think of that answer does not change the fact that words do, in fact, matter.

And I think Clinton is way overplaying her hand here. Let's leave aside the fact that the man who has supposedly been plagiarised has issued a statement backing Obama:

The Obama campaign has issued a statement from Gov. Patrick: “Sen. Obama and I are long-time friends and allies. We often share ideas about politics, policy and language. The argument in question, on the value of words in the public square, is one about which he and I have spoken frequently before. Given the recent attacks from Sen. Clinton, I applaud him responding in just the way he did.

He then said this in a telephone interview:

In a telephone interview on Sunday, Mr. Patrick said that he and Mr. Obama first talked about the attacks from their respective rivals last summer, when Mrs. Clinton was raising questions about Mr. Obama’s experience, and that they discussed them again last week.

Both men had anticipated that Mr. Obama’s rhetorical strength would provide a point of criticism. Mr. Patrick said he told Mr. Obama that he should respond to the criticism, and he shared language from his campaign with Mr. Obama’s speechwriters.

Mr. Patrick said he did not believe Mr. Obama should give him credit.

“Who knows who I am? The point is more important than whose argument it is,” said Mr. Patrick, who telephoned The New York Times at the request of the Obama campaign. “It’s a transcendent argument.”

Now the idea that Clinton or McCain work without speechwriters and are responsible for every single phrase they utter on a public platform is ludicrous on it's face and I note that Clinton is already positioning herself for any inevitable blowback from this:

It turns out that, after raising the issue of Senator Barack Obama “borrowing” someone else’s campaign rhetoric, the Clinton campaign reportedly not only says it can’t guarantee that it never did the same thing — but it also now suggests that if even if it did, it would not be a big deal if it involved Hillary Clinton.

So we not only have two campaigns…apparently two sets of standards for campaigns. ABC’s Political Punch:

In a conference call just now the Clinton campaign would not guarantee that Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-NY, has never used someone else’s rhetoric without crediting them.

I asked Clinton communications director Howard Wolfson and Rep. Jim McGovern, D-Mass, if they could assure the public that neither Clinton nor McGovern has ever done what Sen. Barack Obama, D-Illinois, did when he used the rhetoric of Gov. Deval Patrick without footnoting him.

They would not.

In fact, Wolfson seemed to say it wouldn’t be as big a deal if it were discovered that Clinton had “lifted” such language.

“Sen. Clinton is not running on the strength of her rhetoric,” Wolfson said.

Hmmmm.

Clinton has opened herself up to a firestorm here. The simple truth is that Ted Sorensen wrote JFK's best lines just as Peter Robinson put the words, "Tear down this wall" into the mouth of Ronald Reagan. Politicians have speechwriters, that is simply a given.

However, the danger for Hillary is that editors will now scour her every utterance looking for signs of plagiarism. And her defence - that it doesn't matter as Obama is running simply on rhetoric and she is running on substance - won't wash. The truth is that Hillary, in an attempt to catch up with Obama, has behaved like Karl Rove did towards John Kerry; reducing a person's political philosophy to a glib soundbite which they then attack. In Kerry's case it was "flip-flopper" in Obama's case it is that he "lacks substance".

But Clinton better be very sure that her speechwriters have never lifted so much as a sentence from anyone else or she is going to open herself up - not just to the charge of plagiarism - but to the even worse charge of hypocrisy.

UPDATE:

Even Captain's Quarters, a blog from the right hand side of the blogosphere has identified Hillary's charge as the nonsense that it is:

Patrick has counseled Obama on how to counter the experience argument, as Patrick had to face it in his race in 2006. Patrick put his speechwriters in touch with Obama's team to develop the same themes in his stump speeches after consultations last week.

That's a lot different than plagiarism. In fact, to quote Samuel L. Jackson in Pulp Fiction, it "ain't the same [expletive] ballpark, it ain't the same league, it ain't even the same [expletive] sport." When Joe Biden lifted entire passages of British Labour leader Neil Kinnock's speeches and passed them off as his own -- and as James Joyner notes, even including Kinnock's personal anecdotes -- that's plagiarism. Biden was unethical and dishonest, while Patrick wanted Obama to make use of his constructs. Perhaps Obama could have referenced Patrick in the speech, but he wasn't quoting Patrick, and how many other ways could he have said the same thing?

Put simply, it's nonsense. It is, however, an indication of how desperate Hillary has become to derail Obama. The supposed victim, Patrick, has already issued a statement hotly criticizing Hillary's campaign for this attack. That should answer the question rather neatly, and call into question why Team Hillary would have launched this attack without securing the support of Patrick for the faux outrage.

Watch the backfire that comes out from this.

UPDATE II:

And when people say he lacks substance, what exactly do they mean by that? They certainly can't mean that he has no policies. Speaking as a Brit I am obviously more concerned with his foreign policies, which are markedly different from what has gone before under Bush:

“When I am this party's nominee, my opponent will not be able to say that I voted for the war in Iraq; or that I gave George Bush the benefit of the doubt on Iran; or that I supported Bush-Cheney policies of not talking to leaders that we don't like. And he will not be able to say that I wavered on something as fundamental as whether or not it is ok for America to torture — because it is never ok… I will end the war in Iraq… I will close Guantanamo. I will restore habeas corpus. I will finish the fight against Al Qaeda. And I will lead the world to combat the common threats of the 21st century: nuclear weapons and terrorism; climate change and poverty; genocide and disease.

So maybe one of these buggers who keeps saying that he lacks "substance" will be kind enough to define what exactly characterizes this "substance" which they say that he lacks. It's one thing to disagree with his policies, but it's rank intellectual dishonesty to pretend that he doesn't have any.

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Tags: Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, plagiarism, US election 2008, democratic nomination, Deval Patrick