Anatomy of a smear [View All]

[ProSense]

The media is giving Obama a free pass, so goes the meme. In reality, there just isn't much there to attack, and most of the despicable attacks are coming from Hillary's campaign. Consider this Harper's interview, Six Questions on How the GOP Will Run Against Obama for John Brabender:

Barack Obama doesn’t have the Democratic presidential nomination sewn up, but barring some very unexpected results tonight the odds seem to be moving in his favor. Obama has proved to be a formidable campaigner, as former frontrunner Hillary Clinton can testify. He’s smart, charismatic, inspiring and other than his ties to Antoin Rezko almost entirely untainted by scandal. So how does the GOP run against Obama if he does in fact secure the nomination? I asked that question of John Brabender, Chief Creative Officer and managing partner of BrabenderCox, a leading GOP media firm. His past and present clients include Senators Tom Coburn, David Vitter and Rick Santorum, as well as the Rudy Giuliani for President campaign.

Today showed just how easily Hillary's campaign can manipulate media coverage. Her campaign threw the accusation of "plagiarism" by the Obama campaign out to the media. At first, the NYT identified the source only as a "rival campaign."

It was picked up by:

NYT: An Obama Refrain Bears Echoes of a Governor's Speeches
CNN: Similar Obama, Patrick speeches scrutinized
Politico: Clinton aide accuses Obama of plagiarism
The Swamp: Did Obama plagiarize? Clinton team says yes
Talk Left: Obama and Duval Patrick's Shared Language: Issue or Not?

Pushed by Hillary's surrogates:

Taylor Marsh: 'I Have a Dream' Becomes Obama's 'I Have a Con'
Larry Johnson: Just Words, But Whose Words?

Even the RW media and wingnut blogs (including some of Hillary's favorites) chimed in:

Weekly Standard: Just Words
American Spectator: Clinton Campaign Launches War Over Words
Hot Air: Video: The audacity of derivativeness
Grand Theft Quoto
Town Hall: Obama Echoes Deval's Speeches
Power Line: "Just words," and borrowed ones at that

Then came the updates...

CNN: Obama, Clinton camps point to 'borrowed rhetoric'

Jake Tapper: The Clinton Campaign Just Now..., claiming the plagiarism standard they set
doesn't apply to Hillary.

With its latest attack, desperation by Hillary's campaign has entered silly season:

Former Clinton Speechwriter Weighs In On Plagiarism-Gate '08

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 Down 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

The plagiarism story took the focus off a couple of interesting real news developments:

Obama Bought Home Without Rezko Discount, Seller Says. As noted here:

For months, reporters have been digging around a land deal between Barack Obama and indicted political fixer Tony Rezko. Despite article after article finding no legal wrongdoing (but suggesting that some was at hand) Obama’s political opponents have continued to use the event to suggest the Senator somehow did something illegal.

Hillary's campaign and her surrogates are among the the driving forces behind this non story

The other story that went under the radar today was that Hillary's campaign is showing more signs of incompetence when it comes to running a campaign minus dirty attacks.

The frenzy over the plagiarism story reminds me of another time when everyone knew what was real and true, but decided to distort the facts, and Hillary joined in the distortion.




edited typo