Borrowed Rhetoric on the Campaign Trail
As Captain Renault never once said in Casablanca, "I'm shocked . . . shocked to find that plagiarism is going on in here."
According to CNN, the Clinton campaign has just discovered "alarming similarities" between several lines in Barack Obama's stump speech and a portion of a two-year-old speech by Obama-supporter Deval Patrick, the governor of Massachusetts. This shocking revelation comes almost ten months after it was first reported by Scott Helman in The Boston Globe: "Patrick, Obama Campaigns Share Language of 'Hope'" (free site registration required).
Old news or not, should Obama have credited his source? "I’m sure I should have," the candidate has said, adding, "I really don't think this is too big a deal."
We'll leave it to others to sit (and blog) in judgment. What caught our attention was one of the familiar lines cited by both Patrick and Obama to support their point that rhetoric isn't always "empty" and that stirring words sometimes do matter.
"We have nothing to fear but fear itself."
In fact it's a misquotation from the opening of Franklin Roosevelt's first inaugural address:
So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself--nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.It's certainly a memorable sentence, a hyperbolic observation neatly balanced by diacope and amplified with a tricolon that seeks to dispel fear by negating it.
But since we're on the subject of oratorical originality, we might ask whether F.D.R. deserves full credit for crafting this forceful line.
The answer, suggests Ralph Keyes in The Quote Verifier: Who Said What, Where, and When (St. Martin's, 2006), is "not really":
Shortly before his first inauguration Franklin Delano Roosevelt was given an anthology of Henry David Thoreau's writings. This volume included Thoreau's 1852 thought that "Nothing is so much to be feared as fear." Thoreau's book was in FDR's hotel suite as he wrote his inaugural address. An aide thought Walden's author was the probable source of Roosevelt's most memorable line, "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself," which did not appear until a late draft of his inaugural address. But Thoreau's thought itself had antecedents: "The thing of which I have most fear is fear" (Michel de Montaigne, 1580), "Nothing is terrible except fear itself" (Francis Bacon, 1623), and "The only thing I am afraid of is fear" (Duke of Wellington, circa 1832).So if Roosevelt had paused in his speech on March 4, 1933 to identify his sources, how might he have worded the citation? "Credit the thought to Montaigne," Keyes says, "its improvement to Bacon, and the final version to FDR, with help from Thoreau."
Quite a mouthful--and probably not "too big a deal" when you think about it. What FDR had on his mind, after all, was a New Deal.
Classic Speeches:
Comments
Hillary Clinton can really do better if this is the lynchpin or red-herring for Barack Obama’s campaign. Using similiar phrases from an ally in which , the ally, stated that they both used the same rhetoric and ideas. I find it hard for Hillary to make the claim of plagirism when the person Barack allegedly plagirized from said he didn’t. Really Really sad..
I here Hillary didn’t write her book and help PAYED help in the amount of $120,000 to Feinman (Writer’s Name).
Hillary didn’t mention her AT ALL in her book, and had the nerve to say “I wrote every word”.
here’s the link from Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It_Takes_a_Village
After videos of Hillary stealing speech lines from both Obama and John Edwards yesterday on News headlines I believe it will have no effect…
http://abcnews.go.com/Video/playerIndex?id=4308238
May even hurt her more for during the same and calling someone else out.
Some statements don’t require footnotes. They have, by their intrinsic value, become a part of our political and patriotic landscape. “Ask not what your country can do for you…..” We can all finish the quote and understand the ideas it conveys. Patrick’s words have that same ring to them. The idea they convey is universal and beyond the textbook idea of attribution. The Clintons’ downfall has been academic and intellectual elitism and a lack of ability to inspire and empower the people. Intelligence in the midst of political and national gridlock is more stifling for this country than hopeful movement of any kind.
In my opinion, I dont think its the fact that he may have “borrowed” the phrase or phrases…to me it’s the whole concept. My thing is do you really mean what you are saying or is the whole thing a “This sounds better to the people” type thing. I know that half of the things that both sides are saying they will do, will probably never get done, but I at least would like the comfort in knowing that you do mean SOME of what you say.
I have been saying this for a long time, Obama’s authenticity is highly questionable. It is a big of an ugly irony that while Obama attests that his campaign is not just about lofty rhetoric, he is yet using the same lofty rhetoric from another politician. Barack does not write his own speeches, he performs them. He performs the speeches quite well, well enough to pack in the crowds, but he does not write anything he says. Usually, his main speech writer (who is incidientally is the young 26 year old white man Jon Favreau) often lifts various passages the straight out of the speeches spoken during the 60’s civil rights era. If that is all Obama has going for him, just a performance, hwo can we truly expect him to bring about change?
This is a highly legitimate concern. If anything, it is disturbing that some pundits have been calling the plagiarism “no big deal.” Yet, Obama has been relying on words, on the power of language, on emotionally charged language dating all the way back from Jefferson through Martin Luther Kind Jr. to Jesse Jackson and to Deval Patrick, who is conveniently a friend and an ardent supporter who naturally alleges that Obama had his consent. He has been lifting choice phrases for all his speeches, and that has been effective for him. But, this latest rather hefty chunk of lifted verbatim is almost a lie. Couldn’t he have simply rewritten the text to make it more his own? He is not running on experience, nor or substance, but on the power of his words. If his words are not his own, what does he have left. His Audacity of Hope, as it turns out, was actually a collaboration. How much writing in his second book did he actually contribute? We need a candidate who can be trusted, not one who takes extreme shortcuts.
Obama is agas-bag, pure and simple.
As I see it,Deval Patrick’s sole contribution to the quote was the use of the word “words?”. After all, Martin Luther king’s and FDR’s phrases are in the public domaine and known by everybody, as are Thomas Jefferson’s words in the Declaration of Independence. Therefore, one must criticise the order in which Obama used the quotes and assume that Deval Patrick has established a copyright over not the quotes themselves but the order in which they are used. Or, consider this a whole lot of shit being made over nothing.
It seems to me that this Obama-plagiarism charge is all a tempest in a teapot. Or to quote the immortal W.C.Fields,”There is no there there.” Hillary please note: Martin Luther King’s and FDR’s words are in the public domain. And the Declaration of Independence has been immortalised. Therefore, Deval Patrick’s copyright would only extend to the word “words?”, unless we assume that they also extend to the order in which he used the quotes, which would be a novel legal principle.