Asked last night about accusations from the Clinton camp that he “plagiarized” speech lines from Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick, Obama was quick with the cool, dismissive catchphrase. “This is where we start getting into silly season in politics,” he said. “Deval is a national co-chairman of my campaign, and suggested an argument that we both share: that words are important. That words matter. And the notion that I had plagiarized from somebody who was one of my national co-chairs, who gave me the line and suggested that I use it, I think, is silly.''
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: he’s absolutely right. That’s not plagiarism. It’s accepting help from a friend and adviser. Clinton was wrong to harp on the charge in Wisconsin–where it did little to help her–and wrong to characterize it as “change you can Xerox” in last night’s debate.
Which is why I was disappointed to see Team Obama respond to Clinton’s effective “final moment”–you know, her moving little soliloquy about how “the hits [she’s] taken are nothing compared to what goes on every single day in the lives of people across our country,” how both she and Obama are “going to be fine” and how she “hope[s] that we’ll be able to say the same thing about the American people”–by accusing her of plagiarism, too. At 10:12 p.m., an email from Obama spokesman Bill Burton titled “Clinton’s ‘best moment’ someone else’s line?” arrived in my inbox. According to Burton, Clinton copped her “fine” line from John Edwards, who once uttered the totally idiosyncratic sentence “all of us are going to be just fine no matter what happens in this election, but what’s at stake is whether America is going to be fine.” (It’s not the first time they’ve called Clinton a thief, by the way.) Soon, Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo noted that Bill Clinton had once minimized the hits he’d taken as well, and the Obamabots were off and running, cutting and pasting the damning quotes into comment boards across the blogosphere and emailing them to every reporter they could find (including me).
I get it. You think Hillary is being a hypocrite, and you’re probably right. But regurgitating charges that Obama has already (rightly) dismissed as silly–especially when the effect is more “gotcha” than productive–is a perfect example of the very thing your candidate is campaigning against: politics as usual.
And that’s not exactly change we can believe in.
To, you know, coin a phrase.
