We asked former Bill
Clinton speechwriter David Kusnet if today's plagiarism accusations against Barack Obama were justified. In his mind, was what Obama did acceptable, or a violation of speechmaking ethics? Here are his thoughts ...
Barack Obama’s greatest strength is the originality of his
rhetoric. Sometimes he talks like a regular person, as in his keynote address
at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, when he introduced himself as “a
skinny kid with a funny name.” Sometimes, he sounds like a president from an
earlier, more historically literate era, as when he situates his campaign in a
tradition that includes the American Revolution, the abolitionists, and the
emergence of the labor movement, the civil rights movement, and other social
struggles. But only rarely, if ever, does he use the familiar freeze-dried
phrases that most current politicians favor. To borrow a phrase from the UAW,
the “domestic content” of his speeches is unusually high.
That’s only one of many reasons why it’s so silly to accuse
Obama of plagiarism because he used some of the same phrases as his friend and
ally, Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick (who, I should add, was helpful to
me when he was assistant attorney general for civil rights at the same time I
was a speechwriter for President Bill Clinton). If plagiarism is borrowing
rhetoric without permission, Patrick most likely is happy to have Obama sound
similar notes, such as hope and inspiration being more than “just words.” Even
if Obama and Patrick didn’t know each other, they might use some of the same
phrases because similar public figures frequently draw on common streams of
public rhetoric. For instance, labor leaders often echo Walter Reuther or A.
Philip Randolph; civil rights leaders draw upon the same scriptural passages
and historical sources; and conservative Republicans repeatedly invoke Ronald
Reagan. Similarly, John Edwards borrowed a rhetorical technique from his
campaign manager, fellow populist and former Michigan
congressman, David Bonior: His litany would begin “Somewhere in America,” and
then he’d describe a social or economic injustice, such as a worker losing his
job and his family’s health insurance. While Politico ran a story
about this, it is hardly unusual for a candidate to share a rhetorical
technique with his leading adviser.
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 Dowd 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.
--David Kusnet