Did John McCain and Hillary Clinton Plagiarize Obama?
David Kusnet [via memeorandum], former speechwriter to President Bill Clinton, comments on the Obama plagiarism accusation:
After all, if there is one sentence from Scripture that is literally true, it is this line from Ecclesiastes: “There is nothing new under the Sun.” To be condemned as plagiarism, a political speech needs to be grievously offensive–using lots of distinctive but little-known material from another source without attributing it to that speaker or receiving his or her permission. For instance, in 1987, Joe Biden once used, without attribution, a speech by the British Labor Party Leader Neil Kinnock, in which Kinnock credited social programs with the fact that he was the first in his family to have attended college. By borrowing the speech and inserting his own name, Biden suggested that the men in his family had been coal miners when, in fact, as Maureen Down dryly noted, his father had been an auto dealer. (In fairness, Biden had quoted Kinnock when he had given the speech on other occasions.) Does what Obama did come close to what Biden did? Absolutely not. Next scandal, please.
I agree.
In his victory speech after his Potomac Primary wins Sen. John McCain talked about “hope” and went so far as to end his speech saying, “I am fired up and ready to go.” Did he plagiarize Obama?
The Obama campaign sent out a press release citing instances of Sen. Clinton using similar turns of phrase as Obama. Did she plagiarize Obama?
Until we see a documented pattern of Obama swiping words this isn’t a story. Oh how I wish otherwise. Move along, nothing to see here.
UPDATE: Last December in a speech in Iowa Obama said,
I chose to run because I believed that the size of these challenges had outgrown the capacity of our broken and divided politics to solve them; because I believed that Americans of every political stripe were hungry for a new kind of politics, a politics that focused not just on how to win but why we should, a politics that focused on those values and ideals that we held in common as Americans; a politics that favored common sense over ideology, straight talk over spin.
Did he plagiarize John McCain?
Remember that one speeh where McCain said “Good Afternoon?”
I do – and that was a rip-off from Bush 43.
Then one time he said – “And will keep my word.”
Hillary used that in Omaha.