“Sen. Obama is running on the strength of his rhetoric and the strength of his promises and, as we have seen in the last couple of days, he’s breaking his promises and his rhetoric isn’t his own.”Initially, the Obama campaign downplayed the charge, saying Obama and Patrick are friends who 'share thoughts on ideas and language', accusing the Clinton campaign of 'grasping at straws'. In a follow up press conference, Obama said:
"When an author plagiarizes from another author there is damage done to two different parties. One is to the person he plagiarized from. The other is to the reader," said Howard Wolfson.
Obama closely echoed a passage from a speech that Deval Patrick, now the Massachusetts governor, used at a campaign rally when he was running for that office in 2006.
"He has occasionally used lines of mine. I have occasionally used some words of his. I know Sen. Clinton has used words of mine as well. I don’t think that is something that workers here are concerned about," he said, adding that "I'm sure I should have" given credit to Patrick.On the other hand, John McCain is still singing the praises of Hillary Clinton. As Michelle Malkin says:
Bottom line: "I really don’t think this is too big of a deal," Obama said.
John McCain is incapable of disagreeing with strict immigration enforcement activists without lambasting their character, honest, and integrity. We’re “nativists” and Jim Crow-style racists who should just “f**k” off. He couldn’t help sneering at former GOP rival Mitt Romney’s business experience as dishonorable and greedy. And his personal vindictiveness toward GOP Hill staffers who have opposed his positions is well-known.
Contrast this treatment of people in his own party with McCain’s treatment of his supposed ideological opposite, Hillary Clinton. Yesterday, McCain was asked about his comment three years ago that Hillary would make a “good president.” If his explanation of the remarks to George Stephanopoulous is supposed to “calm down” conservatives, the McCain camp is 1) more out of touch with reality than I imagined, and 2) hurtling towards a repeat of the 1996 Dole/Kemp disaster faster than I imagined. When Hillary’s Democrat rival, Barack Obama, is doing a better job of attacking the ethically-challenged, truth-challenged, integrity-challenged Clintons than the GOP presidential front-runner, we are in deep doo-doo.
Very deep doo-doo indeed! Add that to the fact that one of McCain's top advisers refuses to attack Obama, and McCain doesn't appear terribly willing to scrap for a win at all.
It will be interesting to see how this all plays out, but I have the feeling it will be much like watching a slowly-unfolding train wreck.
There's my two cents.
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