March 1, 2008, The War on Plagiarism
While Senator Clinton fires wild shots that hit nothing (though the recoil seems to keep knocking her ever further off her game) about Senator Obama's supposed "plagiarism" by using lines from Mass. Governor Deval Patrick it appears that the nation's new "war on plagiarism" has claimed its first victim, ironically, unrelated to the Obama team at all, but none other than White House (and former Gary Bauer) aide Tim Goeglein, who seems to have copied huge swathes of his columns published in his (and Frank Burns') hometown of Ft. Wayne, IN.
Ah, the bitter irony of it all.
Meanwhile, it seems that desperate times have called for desperate measures, replete with Team Clinton running ads in Texas touting Hillary's "experience in a crisis" complete with a child sleeping at 3 a.m., though Team Clinton couldn't actually explain just what actual experience she has being "tested in a crisis". [While I won't dignify it with a link, I will note that there also seems to be a potential kerfuffle brewing re a not-so-subtly-racist message embedded in said ad; to quote, ahem, Drudge... developing!]
As Mahablog's Barb notes in a further post on the subject, many people rightly mistake this for a McCain ad: Senator John "I'll be 72 on Inauguration Day" McCain's main appeal will well be his long (and ACTUAL, PERSONAL) experience in government... why, in God's name, has Hillary Clinton, who, to be quite frank, has a great deal to recommend her (to go along with her baggage), insisted on running on her "35 years of experience"... WHY? Come on, Senator Clinton: you have been married to Bill Clinton for 35 years. Good for you.
Look: I have already announced my support for my college classmate, Barack Obama, and quite frankly, I stand by it. Who he is-- a man of color who spent part of his childhood in a Muslim country (and a man with a Muslim father and the middle name "Hussein") with a career in academia (constitutional scholarship, actually), community activism and state government-- makes him much more likely to be the guy we need, right now, to get us back on track to be the kind of society we have the potential to be, and to restore our place in the world.
Senator Clinton might be able to achieve this as well (and if she somehow pulls out the nomination, I will support her). But the disarray of her campaign is not a comforting sign. What she should have run on is something very similar to Obama's campaign: basically, a campaign about "crashing through the glass ceiling," "fighting the good fight against the odds" (even if you don't always win, the fight itself is worth it), and "standing up against bigotry and hate" (and irrational personal attacks)... in short, she should (have) play(ed) to her REAL strengths, and not to her husband's.
Ironic, no? The campaign that has launched our nation's "War on plagiarism(TM)", is, at its core, essentially plagiarizing its candidate's own "experience" from another person named Clinton.