Stealing Words

'I Have a Dream' Becomes Obama's 'I Have a Con'
Taylor Marsh
When Senator Joe Biden was found to have lifted pieces of someone else's speech he was politically humiliated. One wonders what the reaction to Senator Obama will be, now that we find out that those all important words he's been spouting are not his own. Will the standard be different for him?
During a conference call this morning, Howard Wolfson had this to say. Via Mark Halperin:
"If you're going to be talking about the value of words, the words ought to be your own." - Howard Wolfson
Rhetorical flourishes are inspiring, especially when they're authentic. The problem comes when they're canned. Jake Tapper has a good run down on Obama's convenient oratory. It would be one thing if they came from the heart, or if what he was saying was actually original. Unfortunately, they don't and they aren't. They've all been said before. "Yes, we can reuse slogans!" says Ben Smith. "You bet your life we can," quips Deval Patrick. Si Se Puede. The word bamboozled comes to mind.
Deval Patrick in October, 2006:
" ... All I have to offer is words, just words. 'We hold these truths to be self evident. That all men are created equal.' Just words. Just words. 'We have nothing to fear but fear itself.' Just words. 'Ask not what your county can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.' Just words. 'I have a dream.' Just words."
A reader from Massachusetts emailed me this last night:
... Guess what the lead-off story was on the local broadcast news tonight? Yes, "Plagiarism?" It was all about how Obama's "just words" riff was strikingly similar to Deval Patrick's speech from 2006. The story included a grainy video of Patrick delivering his speech, and then the clip from Obama's speech the other night. The reporter mentioned that the two shared campaign strategist, and that borrowing from others' campaigns wasn't that uncommon. However, it could cause a problem for Obama because it raises the idea that he may be just reading from a script. Then cut to the Hillary Clinton saying it's going to take more than speeches, it will take hard work.
It's what the New York Observer wrote about earlier in January. Via writer Steve Kornacki:
One small Obama-related detail from last night: The "Yes we can!" refrain that Barack Obama trumpeted in his concession speech was actually the campaign theme adopted by Deval Patrick, a top Obama supporter who rode the slogan to the Massachusetts governorship in 2006.
Oh, but wait! Before the bleachers come crashing down, Governor Deval Patrick issued a statement on the mutual mission of Patrick and Obama, which also just happens to include mirrored language and speeches that are exactly alike. Patrick's statement comes complete with... wait a minute. Excuse me, but the word gypsy must have run all out. Tapper offered Patrick's ramblings in an update:
UPDATE: The Obama campaign has issued a statement from Gov. Patrick: "Sen. Obama and I are long-time friends and allies. We often share ideas about politics, policy and language. The argument in question, on the value of words in the public square, is one about which he and I have spoken frequently before. Given the recent attacks from Sen. Clinton, I applaud him responding in just the way he did."
Tapper's comments afterwards are spot on.
The Boston Globe joined Deval Patrick with Barack Obama back in April of 2007. That was two months after I reported on Obama's flyover to skip the first issues debate in Carson City, Nevada, which was followed by his subsequent phone in presentation, as he showed up unprepared for the first health care debate. (This all happened long before I became a partisan for Clinton.) Now it's all these months later and all we've got today is a gullible traditional media sharing the same hope soda, while aiding and abetting a political con job that's sucked in independents by the droves in a DEMOCRATIC primary race.
Cons eventually catch up with you. Obama's played his supporters for suckers. They bought into the hope hype, sucking up this stuff with a straw, only to find out Obama's not an original, he's a knock off, of a governor, no less. Siphoning off of a winning campaign to try to win the presidency with a formula. Hey, it's politics. One campaign model fits 'em all. Put your twenty bucks in the bucket and shut the hell up!
The traditional media, cable talking heads, and quite a few large progressive blogs have regurgitated the Obama story like a pack of nomads wandering in the political desert in search of sustenance; people bankrupt of political or factual integrity looking for the answer and refusing to see what was in front of their faces all along. The question is whether the journalists who bought into the Obama hype, along with the cable talking heads who propped his campaign up, and the Obama blogs who didn't care one whit about the facts or his record but were only interested in spreading their Hillary hatred, have got so much invested they won't have the honesty, the integrity, and the moral courage to back peddle on their craven cave in before it's not only too late for them, but too late for the Democratic party.
Barack Obama isn't an original. He's the first 21st century L. Ron Hubbard of politics, Elmer Gantry, name your huckster.
"I have a dream" just became "I have a con."
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Washington, Lincoln, Bush
Marty Kaplan
Here's a desirable "learning outcome" for first grade students in the public schools of Georgia: being able to answer the question, "How are Washington, Lincoln, and Bush alike?" In their classrooms, Georgia's 6-year-olds "will compare and contrast information about Washington, Lincoln, and our current president. This information will be recorded on a Venn diagragram.
I don't know how many other states require this Venn diagram to be created, or whether first-grade teachers will accept
information for the place where the three presidents' circles overlap -- commonalities like not having gills, possessing opposable thumbs, or putting on their pants one leg at a time.
But I do know that George Bush loves to say what he has in common with Washington and Lincoln: how little it matters what people say about him today. "I don't think you'll really get the full history of the Bush administration until long after I'm gone. I tell people I'm reading books on George Washington, and they're still analyzing his presidency," he told 60 Minutes. At Camp David, he told ABC's Charlie Gibson, "I tell people I read three books on Washington last year, and if they're still writing on the first guy, the 43rd guy isn't going to be around to see it... I spent a lotta time reading about Abraham Lincoln, Abraham Lincoln had no earthly idea that the Gettysburg Address was a great speech.... You know, history, it's just, it, I, I've always felt that there needs to be a long leash to history. That you can't judge an administration, immediately. And, particularly one that has pushed hard for some big ideas, like, like, my administration has done."
Ah, yes, those big Bushie ideas. Tax cuts in wartime, the unitary executive, signing statements, waterboarding, gay-baiting... You can almost imagine a first grade exercise that teaches them. Put a circle around the ones that don't belong:
A. American Revolution. B. Civil War. C. Iraq War.
A. Beware the baneful effects of the spirit of party. B. The party lash and the fear of ridicule will overawe justice and liberty.C. Democrats are terrorist-loving cut-and-runners.
Bush, of course, takes the long view of his place in presidential history. No one who saw this fly-boy swagger beneath the "Mission Accomplished" banner (on the USS Abraham Lincoln, no less) is qualified to characterize that act as one of the most loathsome, preening, hubristic degradations of the presidency in all of American history because... well, because none of us is dead yet! It'll take a hundred years, and a hundred books, before people have the perspective needed to acclaim his guitar-strumming indifference to Katrina as just what our glorious Republic needed from its POTUS at the time. His flying back from a Crawford for a midnight signing of the Terry Schaivo bill? Why, the only presidential historians who can call that one correctly (a victory for the rights of the undead? a miracle of long-distance diagnosis?) will be the great-great-grandchildren of kids in first grade right now.
I have no difficulty imagining the future historians who will rank W right up there along with the Father of Our Country and Honest Abe, rather than way down there with Warren Harding and Franklin Pierce. After all, the servile savants already beatifying Bush on Fox News, right wing talk radio, and in The Washington Times are as likely to pass their genes and memes down to future generations as is slime mold, and the Snopes clan that inherits the earth in Faulkner's dark vision. And as someone who lived through the Nixon terms, and then the Nixon funeral, and the Reagan terms, and then the Reagan funeral, I'm all too familiar with the press's fondness for the revisionist airbrush. De mortuis nil nisi bonum: speak only good of the dead.
The thing I'm having trouble imagining, though, is the scenario for America's future that George W. Bush thinks will ultimately make him look good. Does he really believe that future historians will look back at his Middle East record as the happy tipping point between radical-fundamentalist-jihadist-extremism and freedom-is-on-the-march? Or does he secretly hope that the tragedy looming in that region's future will be blamed not on him, but on his successors who inherit his broken crockery? Can he really imagine that his contempt for checks and balances, and for the Bill of Rights, will one day be compared favorably to Lincoln's boldness in saving the Union? Or does he believe deep down that the fact he ended up not being impeached will in the long view of history more than outweigh any pesky lefty aspersions about his abuses of power?