Borrowing rhetoric is a real no-no

January 3, 2008

With several top-notch candidates, and some of the best speechwriters in the business working tirelessly on their behalf, it’s only natural for a campaign staffer to hear a rival give a good speech and think, “What a great line! Why didn’t I think of that?”

It leads to a hard-to-resist temptation: “borrow” the line and hope no one notices.

Of course, all of this is frowned upon. It’s a bit like stand-up comedy — everyone knows it happens all the time, but that doesn’t make it OK.

I thought of this after seeing that Hillary Clinton is apparently using some familiar phrases, usually associated with one of her rivals.

One of the things that struck me when I first saw Hillary on the stump six weeks ago … was how many of her best lines were, if not cribbed, then at least inspired by other candidates. At one point, for example, she said she wasn’t running to be “president of the states that voted for Democrats,” she was running to be “president of the United States,” which sounded a lot like Obama’s line about not pitting red America against blue America, but being president of the United States of America.

True, but that’s at least a little subtle. This one isn’t.

“We are fired up and we are ready to go because we know America is ready for change and the process starts right here in Iowa.”

In Davenport, Iowa, those words escaped the barriers of a tired Hillary Clinton’s teeth. Without irony.

That phrase is associated with Barack Obama. Obama borrows it from a woman in South Carolina who helped remind him what was important in life. It’s the signature, in fact, of Obama’s close.

Ouch. That’s pretty bad.

I hate to think there’s a pattern here, but there are quite a few examples:

* “New Clinton Iowa radio ad has voter voice saying she is the candidate of ‘hope.'”

* Yesterday, on Hardball, Clinton’s communication director said Iowans are looking “under the hood and kickin the tires,” a line Obama has been using for quite a while. (Chris Matthews told Wolfson he “stole” the line directly and urged the campaign to “get a new scriptwriter.”)

* As a debate in Philadelphia in October, Clinton said, “We’ve got to turn the page on George Bush and Dick Cheney” — a line straight out of Obama’s stump speech.

I don’t want to make too much out of this. Indeed, it’s extremely unlikely this kind of thing is going to change anyone’s mind about which candidates to support (“I wasn’t going to vote for Hillary, but I started noticing the familiarity of her soundbites and…”).

But I just find the whole thing kind of odd. Campaigns steal ideas and policy proposals all the time, but when someone other than Obama starts saying, “We are fired up and we are ready to go,” it’s bound to raise a few eyebrows.

A perfect illustration that she is an empty shell of a person and that Obama is the real deal.

  • She’s been stealing his lines for months now. Every time Obama gives a good speech, she’s on TV the next day with her version of WHAT OBAMA SAID.

  • I was hoping this wasn’t going to get past everyone. I watched Hardball yetserday. Chris Matthews called Wolfson on it.

  • Hmmmm… Obama supporter here, but I do believe that the “hope” line was originally Clinton’s (Bill, not Hilary). Somewhere in my old stash of junk (unless my parents have thrown it out since I moved out a decade ago… hope not!) is a bunch of campaign stuff from the ’92 campaign (the first which I was ever involved in– did a bunch of volunteering for the state party at the tender age of 11), including a video which, if I remember correctly, was entitled “A Place Called Hope”. So I think the Clintons win that one

  • The thing is, Obama isn’t even a particularly good public speaker. He’s my favourite choice of the current field, but I agree with the previous poster who said is voice gets on your nerves, and he tends to blather a bit about his family and their influence. There generally isn’t a lot of the kind of stuff that lifts you up, makes you proud to be an American and reassures you that the country is going to be on the right end of the leg that’s kicking ass for the forseeable future.

    Take, “government that’s as honest as the people who pay for it”. That tag line was used during a Canadian campaign, but it came from a U.S. politician before that – I forget who, and can’t be bothered to look it up. There’s loads of good stuff not only in old campaign speeches that everyone except the Google Warriors has forgotten, but in campaign speeches from other English-speaking countries that would be even harder to track down and attribute.

    Using an opponent’s current mojo is not only lazy and desperate-looking, it implies a contempt for the electorate who are presumably too dumb to notice.

  • “under the hood and kickin the tires,” – Please. This is a cliche that’s been around for decades. And “turn the page.” Come on now. Who hasn’t heard that a gazillion times?

    As for the others, maybe. But they sound like empty political slogans to me, the kind that get repeated in one way or another thousands and thousands of times in campaigns all over. How many ways can you make these trite phrases and sentiments sound unique?

    Admittedly, I’m cranky today. I’ve about had it with the media and its Hillary witch hunt. She’s not my candidate, but enough is enough They’ve really been piling on in the last month or so.

  • If Hillary had even a fraction as much imagination as she has ambition then she’d be hard to beat. As it is, she seems the Dem most likely to pursue politics as usual and politics as usual has sucked badly for the last decade or so.

  • “Kickin’ tires.” “Fired up and we are ready to go.” “Turn the page on George Bush.”

    Puh-lease! They’re all just a big load of clichés. Politicians need clichés to fall back on when they’re running out of steam. It’s no surprise that they’ve crossed rhetoric, given the amount of speechifying they’ve been doing. Clichés happen to the best of ’em.

    Personally, I bend over backwards to avoid using clichés.

  • Fired up and ready to go? I’m sorry, but this is not “crossed rhetoric”. This is another red flag that Senator Clinton doesn’t have the stuff to close the deal on her own. She relies on Bill Clinton way too much (she was struggling without him) and now, lacking in self-awareness, looks to Obama for language to inspire her audiences.

    God love her, she’s not the candidate the Bill Clinton was and Obama is. As each day goes by, I become less confident that she would have the ability to win the general election.

  • ummm…Obama doesn’t just use “fired up and ready to go” as some little line, he has a 5 minute story about Greenville, Alabama, and a little old lady energizing a room, that ends with an extended call and response based around “Fired up!” and “Ready to Go!” that become the campaign’s mantra throughout Sept, Oct, and early Nov.

    Trying to pretend that Hillary trying to co-opt that is anything but out-and-out plagiarism seems, well, willfully ignorant.

    The New York Times even wrote a long piece about it and posted a video of Obama leading the chant while thousands cheered in response. He did it on national TV (a clip that go replayed multiple times) in South Carolina, at his rally, leading the call-and-response chant for 35,000 people.

    As for “check under the hood, kick the tires”, yeah, that is an old cliche, but its also one Obama has repeated over and over and over every time he’s been asked about the Iowa caucuses and the out-sized importance of a small midwestern state in picking the Presidential nominee. So while he might not have as unique a claim on it as the “fired up!/ready to go!” line, his campaign still does have a pretty good claim on it, one that you have to consciously pretend doesn’t exist to try to twist this into some sort of “press witch hunt” story.

    She also got praised for a line at the Harkin Steak Fry that she cribbed directly from Obama, as was noted at the time on myDD:

    Update [2007-9-16 16:41:9 by Todd Beeton]: Hillary Clinton had a good line. She said that the day after she is elected (she won’t wait for inauguration) she’ll send representatives to travel the world and send the message: “the era of cowboy diplomacy is over, America is back!”

    steak fry review

    There was this response, which is kinda funny in retrospect:

    Kind of ironic, as that line is basically a staple of the stump speech Obama has been using for over a month. I heard him deliver it down here in Miami not 4 weeks ago.

    Something like:

    “I want to go before the UN and tell them, ‘America is back!'”

    LOL.

    It got great applause.

    Indeed, I believe someone posted a diary on this site a couple weeks ago about attending an Obama event in San Fran (it may have been on DKos though) that had video of the entire speech, you can watch it and see for yourself.

    Classic. The most noteworthy part of Hillary’s speech was a rip off.

    Then two posts were cited as evidence, here, with an article quoting Obama, and here, with a link to a video of Obama using the same line

  • “Kickin’ tires.©” “Fired up and we are ready to go.©” “Turn the page on George Bush.©”

    There, fixed it for Barack.

    Personally, I’d prefer the candidate who went around saying, “What Digby said.”

  • I bet Hillary’s been stealing Obama’s great line about how America’s a good place, too.

    Seriously, not one of these phrases are particularly fresh or noteworthy coming from either candidate. They’re a bunch of the same empty stump-speech cliches that every candidate for every office has used in every election in every state. Let’s not kid ourselves into thinking that Obama’s (or any campaigner’s) tired platitudes are anything special or original.

  • Trying to pretend that Hillary trying to co-opt that is anything but out-and-out plagiarism seems, well, willfully ignorant. -Michael

    Excellent points and great comment all around.

  • Steve… your anti-Hilary slip is showing… I’m typically pretty forgiving, but you are truly reaching this time.

    After all, wasn’t Bill Clinton the “man from Hope”. Maybe Obama is the one who is borrowing cliche’s.

  • Well, how many times over the years since any of you were born have you heard the phrase “Time for change” or some such variation on that during an election cycle? Me? I think I’ve heard it every two years uttered by almost all candidates at one time or another. And does anything ever change? Debatable.

  • Then there are the various occasions in which Obama has plagiarized Hillary. I remember a speech just the other day that he began with, “As a woman…”

  • Michael, I will admit some willful ignorance inasmuch as I haven’t paid a hell of a lot of attention to the candidates’ campaigns over the last few months. To me it’s like sweating over a pre-season scrimmage. When I think about the vast resources that have been thrown into this whole process already it makes me sick.

    I guess my point was that these phrases that Hillary has lifted don’t really qualify for the “What a great line! Why didn’t I think of that?” category. “Fired up and ready to go” isn’t exactly some brilliant slogan. And it’s not “rhetoric” either. It’s more like the chorus to a bad pop song. We all know Hillary doesn’t have a searing imagination, and that Obama is good with a phrase. But are these clichéd utterances really “willful plagiarism?” Only if you want them to be. Or if you’re Karl Rove looking for a toe hold. Otherwise it’s just “repeating a neat saying I heard once.” It’s not as if Adlai Stevenson was going around saying “I like Adlai!”

  • I’m thinking that most of these stump speech buzzwords and catchphrases probably originated with some bozo on Millard Filmore’s campaign and they’re all so cookiecutter anyway that it doesn’t bother me all that much. It’s just marking time till the revolution, right?

  • Curmudgeon@20
    Oddly enough, you’re exactly right.
    Millard Fillmore in his third state of the union said the country needed to “turn the page on George Bush”.

    Nobody understood at the time, and it’s quite eerie.

  • Pingback: Hillary Stealing Obama Campaign Rhetoric

    • Comments are closed.