On The Problem Of Plagiarism...

Tobin Harshaw put the issue of Barack Obama's plagiarism to bed today with his piece in the New York Times. As he points out, a line from a Bill Clinton speech in 1992,

“The hits that I took in this election are nothing compared to the hits the people of this state and this country have been taking for a long time,”

bears a striking resemblance to the line Hilary Clinton touted last night as her crowd-winning finish:

“You know, the hits I’ve taken in life are nothing compared to what goes on every single day in the lives of people across our country.”

So now Hilary Clinton's got a clear choice: either drop the childish charges of plagiarism from her attack arsenal, or hold a press conference apologizing for doing the same thing less than an hour after calling Obama on it. Or maybe it's okay to borrow lines from your husband, just not a close friend.

Maybe her cute little insult, "That's not change you can believe in, that's change you can xerox," would have been effective if she didn't do the exact same thing, and if it didn't come across so obviously written that it even drew groans from the live crowd. The whole world knew she was sitting on that stinger and was squirming all night in anticipation of using it.

When will the Clinton camp figure out that every petty insult they throw at Obama does a lot more to hurt their own cause? It only highlights the stark differences between Obama's relatively clean campaign and the Clinton temper-tantrum as they realize that her self-proclaimed advantage in experience is filled with dirty politics and underhanded techniques, rather than honest sacrifice and service to the people.