Obama, Plagiarism, and Political Authorship

The accusation of plagiarism from the Clinton camp didn't hold much water, considering that Deval Patrick gave Obama permission to use his lines.

It brings up the larger point, though, of the authorship of political speech in the first place.

It was telling that Clinton's spokesperson Howard Wolfson in a conference call with reporters refused to guarantee that Clinton had never borrowed from anyone's speeches, or anyone else's words. That's because political speeches and political writing generally is always of dubious authorship. George Bush hasn't written his own speech once in his life. Is that plagiarism?

When a Bush administration official pens an op-ed for the New York Times or the Washington Post, does the Times or the Post verify authorship? Do they confirm that the official, and not a staff member, wrote the piece in its entirety?

Would Paul Krugman be allowed to subcontract his columns? Have a junior staff member write it? Of course not. But the privelege of attaching one's name to work written by others is granted to administration officials all the time. Did George W. Bush actually write the piece that appeared in the Wall Street Journal under his name pledging bipartisanship with the new Democratic-led 110th Congress? What do you think? It's laughable to think Bush wrote any essay on his own, let alone something polished and sophisticated as one of the speeches he can't ever read aloud properly, let alone write.

The point is that leeway is often given to politicians when it comes to authorship, leeway that would not be granted to journalists or academicians. I'm not saying that's a good thing--I think leading papers shouldn't allow staff work to appear under their bosses' names--but it's a reality and it happens all the time. The degree may be different in Obama's case, but borrowing lines from a friend who suggested he do so hardly constitutes a scandal.

That the Clinton camp is trying to make it so shows how desperate they truly are.

UPDATE: David Frum, of all people, on Larry King just now, insisting that the question about Obama was what has he done, not what does he say. Ron Reagan took the words right out of my mouth--what about your guy?