Another weak attack
The Clinton campaign alleged last November hat they had “scandalous information” on Barack Obama. A couple of weeks later they attacked Barack Obama for his kindergarten writings. Pretty weak stuff.
Now they have accused Senator Obama of plagiarism for closely quoting the governor of Massachusetts, who is a friend of Obama, and who share a campaign manager and speechwriter. In a certain sense the Clinton camp’s claim is arguably true, but it is tone deaf. The strange aspect of the accusation is that both the speeches of Obama and Deval Patrick are themselves chock-a-block full of famous quotes — with no citations given — of other politicians and notable Americans, including JFK, FDR, Martin Luther King and Thomas Jefferson. The lifting of these unattributed, famous quotes by both politicians tends to overshadow the little rhetorical device that Obama lifted from Patrick.
So was Obama plagiarizing Patrick, or were both Obama and Patrick plagiarizing their predecessors, or none of the above? Ha ha. And what exactly does it say about the state of the Clinton campaign that it would even occur to some senior person to bother trying to hang this triviality on Obama on the eve of yet more primaries?
UPDATE
In a final, pathetic attempt at spin the Clinton campaign tried to distance itself from its own accusations, saying that they were the work of the media. This AP story debunks that attempt at spin, establishing, among other things, that the attack on Obama came from “a rival campaign that did not want to be identified.”