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"A comprehensive, collaborative elections resource."
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What's in a Word?
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Race
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| Contributor | Brandonius Maximus |
| Last Edited | Brandonius Maximus Feb 20, 2008 10:24am |
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| Category | Commentary |
| News Date | Wednesday, February 20, 2008 04:00:00 PM UTC0:0 |
| Description | Not much, in my experience, if you're a presidential candidate. The speechwriter gives the candidate the speech for the next stop on the flight. He marks it up, or not, and out come the words, like magic. Original means he's never said it before. Usually he has, albeit in a different way. Original doesn't mean he wrote it, but that he's the first one to say it.
So who cares?
By the standards of modern campaigns, Barack Obama is the last person in the world you'd expect to be accused of being a plagiarist. I mean, here's a guy who actually works on his own stuff, has placed his own pen to paper in the form of two bestsellers and reportedly comes up with many of his own lines. Himself. So what gives?
What gives is this is politics, and in politics, copying lines from someone else, even if it's only the result of having the same writer or handler, can be deadly if it goes to your character.
Just ask Joe Biden. He got knocked out of the presidential race in 1987 by the notorious "Biden tape," which showed British Labor Party leader Neil Kinnock and Sen. Biden using the same phrases to describe their boyhoods and come-from-nothing paths to leadership. One front-page New York Times story and one Des Moines Register story later, and Biden was history.
Or ask me, for that matter. I got my job as the manager of the Dukakis campaign in September of 1987 because then-Gov. Dukakis swore up and down that no one from his campaign could possibly have played any role in the dastardly deed of making and distributing that tape -- hardly dastardly at all, by my lights -- and then was forced to eat his words and fire my predecessor, whose fingerprints were, figuratively speaking, all over the tape.
Cut to 20 years later, and the Clinton campaign doesn't even bother to use a third party to charge Obama with the crime for which Biden was beheaded. Why bother? Howard Wolfson, the Clinton communications director who raised the charges against Obama, isn't risking hi |
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