Writing at the website “FutureofCapitalism.com,” former New York Sun vice-president and managing editor Ira Stoll, who is also author of a biography of Sam Adams, thought something sounded very familiar when he listened to President Barack Obama’s speech last night. Stoll had been reading the new book by Thomas Friedman and Michael Mandelbaum, That Used To Be Us: How America Fell Behind in the World It Invented and How We Can Come Back. What Stoll found is that a paragraph in the president’s speech was taken directly from their new book, without attribution.
Stoll gives his blog the title “Presidential Plagiarist?” The title has a question mark, because as you can see, it is actually a scaled down précis of the paragraph written by Friedman and Mandelbaum. Anyone can see, however, that it is taken directly from their book. Usually, when a writer or speechmaker does this, he has a phrase that would say “as the authors of a new book have pointed out…” to make it clear that the information is not the speaker’s insight. I recall in the ’80s listening to a Reagan speech on television about Nicaragua, in which he attributed an insight to an article by my friend Robert Leiken that had appeared in an op-ed column a few days earlier.
So you decide whether or not this is a case of plagiarism. Here is what Ira Stoll writes:
“There are plenty of other points to make about President Obama’s speech on jobs, but one thing that leaped right out at me was how one section was lifted, without any credit, from Thomas Friedman and Michael Mandelbaum’s new book That Used To Be Us: How America Fell Behind in the World It Invented and How We Can Come Back.”
Here is Mr. Obama:
“We all remember Abraham Lincoln as the leader who saved our Union. But in the middle of a Civil War, he was also a leader who looked to the future – a Republican president who mobilized government to build the transcontinental railroad; launch the National Academy of Sciences; and set up the first land grant colleges.”
Here are Messrs. Friedman and Mandelbaum, on pages 37 to 38:
“Abraham Lincoln is best known, of course, for presiding over the federal government during the Civil War, but during that conflict his administration passed several landmark pieces of legislation that spurred America’s transition from an agrarian to an industrial society. One was the Homestead Act of 1862, which opened up the West for settlement by anyone who had not fought against the Union. Another was the Pacific Railway Acts of 1862 and 1864, which connected the eastern to the western part of the country and so laid the basis for a truly national economy. A third was the Morrill Act of 1862, which established a system of land-grant colleges, giving rise to institutions of higher education from Georgia to Californian and from Minnesota to Texas. …Lincoln signed the National Academy of Sciences into being on March 3, 1863, to bring together America’s best researchers to ‘investigate, examine, experiment, and report upon any subject of science or art’ whenever called upon to do so by any department of the government. Remarkably, all of this happened while we were fighting a civil war.”
Next time, the president’s speechwriters should be more careful or more honest. Or do they want their boss to be known as the plagiarist-in-chief?
taking speechmaking points from Joe Biden, I see.
At least he didn’t say that his folks worked 12 hours in a coal mine and still played football afterwards.
Nobody like bashing Little Lenin more than I do, but doesn’t plagarism require near word-for-word matching, not just idea matching? Ideas are cheap, specific language isn’t.
Friedman and Mandelbaum didn’t invest their thoughts from whole cloth either.
And every other thought in Obama’s speeches comes from somewhere else. He hasn’t had an original thought in his life. Like most of humanity.
Not plagarism
More shocking than the attempt to link Lincoln’s government initiatives with himself, Obama has probably never heard of the Senator who was Lincoln’s eminence grise–Charles Sumner, Senator from Massachusetts. I wrote about him here: http://clarespark.com/2008/05/03/margoth-vs-robert-e-lee/. On the cult of the leader and the attempt to conflate Washington, Lincoln, and FDR see http://clarespark.com/2011/03/27/progressive-mind-managers-ca-1941-42/.
I agree that it was not a case of plagiarism, but something worse.
Robert E. Lee sought to end slavery and was a truly great man. So was George Washington.
Lincoln was just another crooked Illinois politician who ravaged the Constitution. FDR also ravaged the Constitution, and in doing so, brought socialism and increased federal government tyranny to the US.
The constant claim that the War Between the States was worth it because it ended slavery is a straw man. The British Empire ended it without any bloodshed, and we could have done the same. Moreover, the system of sharecropping in the South ended up preserving many of the worst features of slavery, with widespread starvation and disease added to the mix. It matters not only what you accomplish (ending chattel slavery) but HOW you accomplish it. In that regard, Abraham Lincoln and his war was an epic fail, and I automatically think less of anybody who idolizes Lincoln or who uses his name in an attempt to spread reflected glory to anyone else.
You want to read about a REAL hero? Here’s one: Draza Mihailovic (PDF, fairly lengthy).
Here’s another one: Capt. Lance Peter Sijan, USAF
And another one: St. Lazar of Serbia
Why is it that whatever PJM blog you land on, you take a piss on the writer? No one here is harming you. Why not back off and find another website to bash. Enough, already.
1389AD – I’ll beg to differ with you on when slavery would have ended in the South. While it is true that British ended slavery peacefully, the South was not ready to do so in 1860. Read, The Dred Scott Case, by Paul Edward Fehrenbacher wherein late in the book he describes Southern thinking on the matter. The other thing to take into consideration is that Lincoln had no intention of freeing the slaves because he was constitutionally disallowed from doing so at that time. (Only when the war began could he do so in the States in rebellion, and he waited until 1863 to do do; he could not do so, and did not do so, for slaves states that remained in the Union because slavery in those state was constitutionally protected.) Also, Lincoln did not start the war, the South did, and in particular South Carolina. That was because the South had a fit of regional hysteria, thinking that Lincoln would free slave, Constitution or no Constitution.
Agreed.
Thin…lackluster…but not plagiarism.
Wiki says,
Twentieth-century dictionaries define plagiarism as “wrongful appropriation,” “close imitation,” or “purloining and publication,” of another author’s “language, thoughts, ideas, or expressions,” and the representation of them as one’s own original work.
Obama hits all the marks for plagiarism. Many presidents cite books they’re reading, or say they’re reading. Obama doesn’t read, but his speechwriters are
shameless. Plagiarism it is.
If it doesn’t have to be word for word, or damn close, then everybody is a plagarist.
Except for the one or two people alive who have had an original thought.
I’m a writer. I have three books published under my real name with a reputable, mainstream publisher (yes, it was a long time ago). I have helped with books that others have written. I have blogged for a long time. I have had people plagiarize from ME. I know plagiarism when I see it.
Obozo’s teleprompter-writers could have put those same thoughts together from any number or combination of sources, or from common knowledge.
As much as I despise Obama, and all his pomps, and all his works, I assert that this is not evidence of plagiarism.
excerpt from codevilla’s seminal article in american spectator
“If, for example, you are Laurence Tribe in 1984, Harvard professor of law, leftist pillar of the establishment, you can “write” your magnum opus by using the products of your student assistant, Ron Klain. A decade later, after Klain admits to having written some parts of the book, and the other parts are found to be verbatim or paraphrases of a book published in 1974, you can claim (perhaps correctly) that your plagiarism was “inadvertent,” and you can count on the Law School’s dean, Elena Kagan, to appoint a committee including former and future Harvard president Derek Bok that issues a secret report that “closes” the incident. Incidentally, Kagan ends up a justice of the Supreme Court. Not one of these people did their jobs: the professor did not write the book himself, the assistant plagiarized instead of researching, the dean and the committee did not hold the professor accountable, and all ended up rewarded…”
Look, I don’t like him a bit, but this is a little nuts. I don’t see any substantial match between the two grafs; the content is similar, but there’s certainly no great creative effort involved in capturing that list of historical events. I’m usually pretty hard-core on this stuff, and I don’t think I’d even look for a footnote, figuring this was common knowledge.
Regurgitation of convenient factoids that fit your narrative, is not Plagiarism. I don’t care if he just read that paragraph last week.
Its not plagiarism.
Lets concentrate on opposing this guys faulty ideas factually, because they simply don’t work, rather than trying to shoe-horn a label that doesn’t fit the circumstances.
Well, it can definitely be determined that this president has no ideas. The problem is that his voter base will never be curious enough to seek out the truth about their leader.
That little passage is from the transcript of what was on the Teleprompter. Obama added something that got him a mention on HotAir’s Obamateurisms. He said that Lincoln founded the Republican Party, which he did not. See http://hotair.com/archives/2011/09/09/obamateurism-of-the-day-587/
Probably not plagiarism in the legal sense, but it’s certainly evidence of intellectual squalor.
It’s a self-righteous and boring attempt to surround himself with the reflected glory of another Illinois politician of the past. I’m reminded of all of the news photos that show Obama with a halo of light around his head. Those photos make some people laugh, but I find them sickening.
“Honest Abe” was a sarcastic monicker for one particular unprincipled railroad lawyer, back in the day. That reminds me of “Honest John’s Used Car Lot” or the like. Nobody would use such a nickname for a person with an actual reputation for honesty. (His opponent, Jefferson Davis, actually was honest. Read about him someday; you’ll be pleasantly surprised.)
Oh, and BY THE WAY, according to the Ten Commandments, idolatry is a SIN.
I don’t know that it’s plagiarism, per se. But it certainly seems to be evidence that it doesn’t take a great mind to think alike. Mediocre minds think alike too.
I’m less concerned about the alleged plagiarism (I don’t see it, by the way) than I am by the fact that Obama apparently believes that Thomas Friedman has an idea worth reciting in Presidential speech before both Houses of Congress. THAT shows the shallowness of Obama’s intellect.
Apologies, forgot to append my “name” to the prior post.
Recitation of a list of widely acknowledged facts is not plagiarism. In fact, since he made the gaffe of saying that Lincoln founded the Republican Party, I am willing to believe that the writers have not even read the referenced book. Research does not seem to be his writers’ strong point. I’m giving Obama a complete pass on this, except that he hired these schlubs.
If we were talking about an essay submitted by a student, I’d mark them down for not attributing the source, as it is clearly derivative. But it is clearly more reworded than the examples of plagiarism I routinely encountered when I was teaching (I retired last year). Mostly it demonstrates how intellectually inferior are Obama and his speechwriters to previous administrations.
Actually, Basil, I knew all those points offhand. You’re not expected to footnote even what’s common knowledge.
No kidding!
If you had to footnote everything that is common knowledge, books would be impossible to write and too ponderous to read.
These things are a judgment call. If one can’t apply a little common sense here, then one might consider seeking treatment for OCD.
Actually, the teleprompter is guilty of plagiarism.
Bad naughty teleprompter!!
Plagiarizing Tom Friedman. It is its own punishment.
There have been several instances of high profile writers plagarizing other people’s works, and didn’t Biden get caught in a speech when he was running for Prez back in the day? In all those cases, the plagarized portion of the work was word-for-word or almost, while here he merely repeats another person’s opinion. I hate to be the one to object to something critical of our President, but he is entitled to his own thoughts. It’s *possible* that he came up with this on his own, and even if he didn’t it’s not beyond the pale to just repeat facts you got out of someone’s history of something, without attribution. If I understand it correctly, if this were a college dissertation, and this were the premise of that dissertation, it might stretch to the limits of plagarism; but we’ve never seen Obama’s dissertations, and we can’t make assumptions, so this clearly isn’t plagarism.
However, we’re absolutely certain Abraham Lincoln didn’t found the Republican Party. No argument on that one…
Well done, as always, Ron. My regard for Lincoln is immense; my regard for BHO is inversely proportional to it. Just remember: it could have been worse. Lincoln could have plagiarized Obama. Then, the high point of Lincoln’s rhetoric would be his modified second inaugural address, “But let’s not dwell on my exit plan from Atlanta. My focus is on jobs, jobs, jobs.”
Obama gave another speech today, in Virginia. In the one short clip I heard, Obama quoted … wait for it … CHURCHILL.
It may not have been a word-for-word, but it was suspiciously close to Churchill’s famous comment that Americans always do the right thing once they’ve exhausted all the other alternatives.
The prez of course didn’t acknowledge the source, and probably doesn’t even know his speechwriters poached the words he spoke from a man he so obviously despises.
I cannot stand B Hussein O, for full disclosure; but I don’t smell a rat here. The facts are too generic.
Who should be mentioned for 2+2=4?
NB – can’t blame B Hussein O for not wishing to mention T.F., that little fool.
Anti-sharia
Sometimes genius is called stealing intelligently. Our president is not a genius. On the other hand he has probably not read the book yet (Friedman/Mandelbaum), so doesn’t even realize his speech writer is a thief. What I cannot understand is that we allow people to run for and get elected to public office on the basis of reading speeches that other people wrote for them. I think this should be outlawed. I wrote such speeches once until I got disgusted and found other employment. Unless the guy reads his own speech, his own words, we have no idea what we are getting. These bozos do not come with a written guarantee.
Hear, hear!
The government emphatically did NOT build the transcontinental railroad. Congress provided the financing via bonds, and granted the lands for passage, but it was NOT built by the government.
Any school-age child knows that.