Obama plagiarizes his speeches. From this, we are to gather, he has a marred character, that he is something less than the above-the-fray politician he has portrayed himself as. Except that’s not the real message here is it?
What separates Clinton from Obama? As I and others have said numerous times, for all practical purposes they are identical. Here and there they have voted differently, but not in ways that will substantially change the face of the nation. With Obama, there may be a few less cluster bombs, which is either a good thing or a bad thing depending on which side of the cluster bomb you want to look at. They are likely to nominate the same kind of judges to the various court positions. They are likely to pull from the same pool of Clinton-era political advisers.
What separates Obama from Clinton is that he is a better speaker.
And, as Clinton knows, oratory is no small matter when it comes to leadership. The ability to make obscure policy decisions resonate with the The People, the ability to persuade enemies to become temporary allies, the ability to convince a diverse people that your way is right, that you are a reasonable and respectful person, that you listen and are willing to compromise–to command that kind power while slathering yourself with lime light–that is what leaders do.
Obama’s oratory is the true cornerstone of his campaign. He launched his campaign by giving a speech at the Democratic Convention in 2004. It was not the official launch of course, but that was when the chatter started. And it started with good reason. Few failed to notice that although Kerry was the official nominee, Democrats could do better. The reason they had hope that all was not yet lost, the reason the Democratic Party felt invigorated, was because of Obama’s speech. It was very good.
He is running on a message of change. That is not uncommon in politicians without a load of Washington experience. But his first message and the one that resonates most strongly with his audiences is his message of hope. I mean Hope.
What are the policies of Hope? Are more public programs the policy of Hope? Are less wars the policies of Hope? Maybe. It certainly wouldn’t take a literature PhD to find a legitimate reason to equate the two. But then Clinton might be running on the message of Hope, except she’s not. In reality there is no policy of Hope. Hope is an attitude. Obama doesn’t dress Hopefully. He doesn’t vote Hopefully. But he talks of Hope and he gives people Hope with his words. The power of Obama’s campaign, indeed, Obama’s real political power, rests on his ability to convince people to do stuff because of his words.
Sanctions, wars, and other punitive actions are what happens in diplomacy when words fail. Politics is the ability to use words effectively. And Obama outdoes Clinton in that capacity everyday he takes the stage. The more people hear of him and from him, the more they like him.
So the real message behind outting Obama’s plagiarism is that “He doesn’t really have that ability, he steals it.” It’s not a knock on his character, (well, it is, but that’s just gravy) it’s a direct attack on his ability to be the leader he says he is.
When Obama made the infamous “Just Words” speech he did so to combat this very notion. Clinton had gone out and made a series of claims that Obama has no policy, just words. But words, Clinton says, don’t provide healthcare; words won’t get us out of Iraq etc. Obama came back with a speech about the power of words. Why then did he choose a series of words within that speech that were very much like those a friend of his spoke a few years earlier?
Some of the defenses of Obama’s choice are that 1) politicians plagiarize speeches all the time and 2) they were friends so it shouldn’t matter.
These two defenses are pretty shoddy. Doing it all the time doesn’t make a thing right and you can plagiarize a friend as well as an enemy (although why one would want to pass off his enemy’s words as his own, I can’t figure out) and that doesn’t make it not plagiarism.
It is true that politicians plagiarize other politicians all the time. As Jerome Doolittle said in Salon magazine, it’s one of the unspoken rules of the trade. Personally I think Doolittle’s examples are weak. A line here and there, pilfered and rearranged are lot less sinister than Obama did. Obama lifted a particularly meaty chunk of Deval Patrick’s speech and delivered it in the same way. Only one pair of <speech>/<”Just words.”> was out of place and that could have been a deliberate choice or done mistakenly out of order, live performance can add these little quirks. There is no question that those lines were not accidentally chosen. But the question does remain if it was plagiarism.
In a very literal sense, I don’t see any way around the charge, but in a different way the charge doesn’t really stick.
For one thing, there is always the distinction to be made between plagiarism and homage. Every one of us “plagiarizes” when we use the phrase “into thin air” first used in Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Some people may or may not know that. Intent certainly is part of “plagiarizing.” Even in court one has to prove that the plagiarist could reasonably have known about the pre-existing work that was plagiarized. But an author like Jon Krakauer, when he used the phrase as the title of his book, did so deliberately and it still wasn’t plagiarism. Part of his “defense” of course is that the phrase has entered into our day-to-day speech. But even if that wasn’t the case the choice would not be plagiarism. It would be what we call “an allusion.” Other writers have more dutifully studied what allusions are, why they are used, and how they work, so I’ll settle for just a few notes on the topic. Allusions are like winks to knowing readers, they are an “inside joke” between knowing participants. It is also a signal, like professional jargon, that indicates that Krakauer is worth knowing as an author because he takes his job seriously enough to know those who came before him. It is also a hint at how we should interpret, in his case, the entire work, but in other cases, just the bit where the allusion occurs.
In Obama’s case, he repeated the good bit in a speech that was delivered in response to a charge that the speaker was only good at using words. To be more clear. Deval Patrick had been accused of being a good orator with no political meat and bones. Deval Patrick is a black Democrat. A lot of people who follow politics, a lot of people who follow black leaders, a lot of people, that is, who like Obama for President, were familiar with Patrick, the charges levied against him, and his oratorical response.
In a very real sense we can interpret Obama’s words on the two levels of 1)a response to Clinton’s charge that speeches don’t matter and 2) a nod to his friend that used that same speech in the same situation years before. That is, it was a good speech and it reminded those in-the-know that this is a tactic that won’t work. It didn’t work against Deval Patrick and it won’t work against Obama either.
Think of two chess players, a few moves are made. White is about to deviate from the standard offensive pattern because he senses that a variation will cause his opponent to falter. Black looks up and says, “Ah! The Russian Variation” and makes a suitable defensive move. The announcement that “I know what you’re up to” is just as important as knowing what they’re up to.
There is something else at work here. Neither Obama nor Deval Patrick wrote that speech that was given on those two days. What Obama did was perform a speech that had already been performed before. We willingly give ourselves over to the illusion that politician write their speeches because we rightly sense that what they’re doing on the podium is something different than what an actor does on stage, but our willful ignorance of the facts doesn’t make it any less of a fact. A speech is a performance as much as it is a written work.
Does Obama’s plagiarism really constitute a black mark on his character? What is the crime of plagiarism? To teachers it’s important that students do their own work. In a professional sense there are copyrights that must be protected. An artist as an artist is the sum of his intellectual/artistic output–so, if he’s stealing his art from someone else, then the victim is the true artist.
Would it have been enough if Obama had gotten permission to perform those words? From whom would he have gotten that permission? Patrick? Patrick’s speechwriter? Or, as Doolittle suggests, do political words and phrases end up in an understood public domain for future speech mining–permission granted by the very nature of it having been delivered? It is my feeling that the latest is true. The best defense is not just that politicians do it all the time, but why they do it. All spoken words are fair for others to take and to have taken from them–within reason of course.
What Obama took was an idea and an effective means of delivering that idea. What Biden took was not, as Doolittle says, “a few sentences.” He took someone else’s personal anecdotes. I don’t think that necessarily raises the level of the “crime” but it’s … weird.
By looking plagiarism up in the dictionary I think it’s pretty clear that the similarities seem complete. But plagiarism is not a dictionary-level offense. It includes measures of quantity and quality. It includes damage done. It includes intent. The issue is further clouded by the nature of the discourse itself and the relationship between the plagiarizer and the plagiarazee. It’s not that plagiarism is a forgivable offense or that there is no plagiarism in politics or in speech making. It’s just that when we think about the topic it’s important to move beyond the simple and easy-to-understand charge and toward a deeper understanding of the charge. Given the facts so far, I’m not so sure that what Obama did warrants the charge of “plagiarism” and the accompanying negative marks on his character report card.
1. Title of post dutifully plagiarized from the novel of the same name by Raymond Benson. Except now that I’ve given Mr. Benson credit, it’s not plagiarism. What if I’d said, “dutifully plagiarized from a novel of the same name.” What if I’d just said, “dutifully plagiarized?”
