I didn’t blog about this at first, because it seemed to come and go quickly. But like all things I have a tendency to put off, it always festers in to something horribly awesome.

The big stink this week is that Obama and Deval Patrick both used the same line in some speeches they each gave. Check out the side by side:

But the thing is, Patrick and Obama have been friends for a long time. Patrick is a national co-chair of the Obama campaign. Patrick says he is not upset at all, and the Obama team point to Hillary and McCain both using his “fired up and ready to go” line recently.Pressed on the matter, Obama said that Patrick “suggested that we use these lines…I thought they were good lines. I’m sure I should have [given him credit], I didn’t this time.” Patrick responded by saying he didn’t need credit.

And that should have been the end of that, if Clinton didn’t like to nit-pick in an attempt to get something, anything on Obama. Tonight’s CNN debate:

BROWN: I think one of the points — I think one of the points that John King was alluding to in talking about some of Senator Clinton’s comments is there has been a lot of attention lately on some of your speeches, that they are very similar to some of the speeches by your friend and supporter Deval Patrick, the governor of Massachusetts, and Senator Clinton’s campaign has made a big issue of this. To be blunt, they’ve accused you of plagiarism.

OBAMA: Right.

BROWN: How do you respond?

OBAMA: Well, look, the — first of all, it’s not a lot of speeches. There are two lines in speeches that I’ve been giving over the last couple of weeks.

I’ve been campaigning now for the last two years. Deval is a national co-chairman of my campaign, and suggested an argument that I share, that words are important. Words matter. And the implication that they don’t I think diminishes how important it is to speak to the American people directly about making America as good as its promise. Barbara Jordan understood this as well as anybody.

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, and, you know, this is where we start getting into silly season, in politics, and I think people start getting discouraged about it…

…

BROWN: Senator Clinton, is it the silly season?

CLINTON: Well, I think that if your candidacy is going to be about words, then they should be your own words. That’s, I think, a very simple proposition. And, you know, lifting whole passages from someone else’s speeches is not change you can believe in, it’s change you can Xerox. And I just don’t think…

And because she’s so vehement about this, we can assume absolutely that she has never plagiarized, and if she did, certainly no one will be fast enough to find and post it within an hour of the debate ending…

Oh.

Bill Clinton, 92: “The hits that I took in this election are nothing compared to the hits the people of this state and this country have been taking for a long time.”

Hillary Clinton, tonight: “You know, the hits I’ve taken in life are nothing compared to what goes on every single day in the lives of people across our country.”

Which just goes to show how completely silly and spurious the attack was in the first place.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 21st, 2008 at 11:21 pm and is filed under Personal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.