A Speech Writer’s Take On The Plagiarism Flap

February 19, 2008

Guest post by Ron Chusid 

Unfortunately dnA is correct in today’s Mini-Report that the plagiarism attacks on Obama, which I discussed yesterday, are not going away. James Fallows weighed in on this story earlier today at The Atlantic. I’ve always respected Fallows’ writing, but in this case his opinion is especially pertinent as he was a speech writer for Jimmy Carter during his 1976 campaign and for two years in the White House. Fallows begins:

The “plagiarism” flap over Barack Obama is bogus and overstated. It makes me think worse about whoever is pushing this complaint, rather than about Obama himself.

onceivably Obama would have been wiser to introduce his recent discourse on the role of “hope” by saying, “As my friend the governor of Massachusetts has often pointed out….” But please: A candidate on the stump utters tens of thousands of words every single day. Few of those can be “original” in any deep sense. For many of the words, even the most brilliant candidate relies on help from people whose job is to think of newer and better ways to make the campaign’s point.* We should be suspicious of candidates who don’t seek this kind of help; it suggests that they are naive about the tradeoffs, triage, and delegation necessary to run a campaign well, let alone an Administration.

The classic campaign stump speech, in its low-rent version, is a memorized mish-mash of things the candidate has already said. In its high-rent version, it’s an improvised and steadily evolving mish-mash of things the candidate has already said — but slightly retuned with each delivery, to reflect the news and the location and the latest charge and countercharge. It’s also slightly altered or enriched with each delivery, to include the latest anecdote or aphorism or snappy phrase or moving line that the candidate, or someone around him, has come across that might help push the campaign’s main theme. Unless a candidate is a total robot, giving the very same speech time after time, he or she is inevitably grabbing whatever idea, illustration, or phrase is at hand. Again, not to do this is to suggest that a presidential candidate is not quite ready for the job.

Moreover, on the specific Patrick/Obama point at issue: it’s not as if no one had thought of this argument (about hope and inspiration), or these examples — FDR, JFK, MLK Jr — before Deval Patrick uttered them. Speechwriters could hardly exist without this theme or these illustrations!

Fallows makes several other good points but I’ll let readers go directly to The Atlantic to read further so that this post doesn’t wind up entirely taking his work.

Cross posted from Liberal Values

I can’t believe Obama has until now resisted telling Clinton, “there you go again!”

  • Danp,

    Agree. Back during the Reagan flap I applied that to Clinton in a post. I used the line partially as a response to Clinton supporters who considered any reference to Reagan to automatically be evil.

  • He gave an extemporaneous barn burner tonight. (Yes it was still cobbled together stump speeches, but still) She used a teleprompter. He’s basically, saying yes, I heard you guys on the nit-picky plagarism crap, and I’ve learned and let me show you. (So there, NYAH. :-P) He also sounded very Edwards-y. And he’s doing something I’ve long wanted to see. He’s asking for a mandate. I need you people to vote on March4, Nov 4 and then to continue working toward change. And he was a lot more specific tonight. And he’s started going more after McCain-Bush than Hillary.

  • The plagiarism gambit is going to blow up in Hillary’s face—badly. She’s been touting the notion that it was the media that first picked up on this—but from what I’m seeing in some of today’s MSM comments, everything is now beginning to suggest that the plagiarism allegations were fed to the media by the Clinton people. Unfortunately for the candidate herself, there’s a hint here and there that she was part of the gossip-vine on this one. She did, after all, start playing the attack—in both personal appearance speeches and in commercial airtime—before this thing even thought of growing media-legs.

    I’m hearing that AP is pushing back on the allegation of “media-borne” with this one, as well.

    Looking at NPR, Reuters, and MSNBC’s collective online front-pages, I’m not seeing any mention of the plagiarism flap. Those “legs” seem to have converted Clinton’s campaign back to “paraplegic status.”

  • We’re not talking about one or two words, or a single phrase. And we’re not talking about a similarity between two speeches.

    We’re talking about a whole passage of a speech, word for word.

    That’s plagarism.

  • Ron, I must have missed your comment (or post) when you used the Reagan quote. Sorry. Please don’t throw me in the briar patch. Can’t we just get along? đŸ™‚

  • From the BBC:

    The spat over whether Obama plagiarised the words of Deval Patrick – the black Governor of Massachusetts – is almost too ludicrous to be serious. The idea that Obama is a phoney – that he simply copied this movement from others – is so plainly barmy as to make me wonder whether the Clinton people are deluded or desperate. The charge is also – I can reveal – old. BBC senior producer Adi Raval brings this to my attention – note the date!

    Yet another illustration that the British have been at this longer than we.

  • Danp,

    My comment wasn’t meant to throw you “in the briar patch.” It was intended to show we were thinking along the same lines on that quote. When I said I used it in a post I meant posts at Liberal Values so I don’t expect you to have seen the post.

  • It was not just a phrase or a few words, it was a whole passage, word for word. It was a highly effective passage — no wonder he wanted to steal it. It was like taking a major portion of some other speech and repeating it word for word as if you had written it. It wasn’t inadvertent (couldn’t be with something that long) and it wasn’t innocuous. It was deliberate plagiarism.

    Who cares what some other speechwriter says about this? It doesn’t matter whether Deval Patrick gave him permission. Obama didn’t credit the source. It would be like giving part of a JFK or FDR or Churchill speech and passing it off as your own words, except the source here was more obscure (as it usually is with plagiarized material).

    Obama has enough education to know what is considered plagiarism. It doesn’t surprise me that his defenders think it is no big deal. People say the same thing about use of steroids or campaign finance violations or perjury or any number of crimes. Obama did something wrong, something he shouldn’t have done.

    If you’re OK with that, then this discussion should be about convenient morals, not speechwriting and what lazy speechwriters do or would like to do.

    People are flunked on their papers for doing what Obama did. If they plagiarize in grad school, they are dropped from the program, because academic work is largely unsupervised and demands the highest standards of honesty. Obama will be unsupervised as president. Does he meet the highest standards of honesty for someone who will have a great deal of responsibility, or does he shrug and take the easier path because no one will know or presumably care? Is that the kind of person you want in office? Apparently, it is who most voters want, but then most people don’t understand complicated issues of morality anyway.

  • Ron Chusid is wrong. It is still plagiarism when you have permission to use someone’s words but fail to cite the source. There was no indication that Obama was quoting anyone, with or without permission. He should have indicated that he was using Patrick’s words, regardless of permission. Quotation marks were invented for situations where someone has given permission to quote. Fair use standards were invented for situations where someone wishes to use a little bit of another person’s writing without getting permission. Obama exceeded fair use because the passage he gave, word for word, was too long. Even with fair use, there is the requirement to cite the source. Ron Chusid, you are wrong, wrong, wrong. Now go away.

  • Mary,

    You are missing the difference between a political speech and a formal paper. The requirements you specify are not used in political speeches–as James Fallows, among others, have explained.

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