Check out Scott Helman in the Globe — almost a year ago (HT Adam, who raises a good question, so check out his post as well):
Of all the things Deval Patrick’s Republican opponent threw at him in last year’s governor’s race, one charge that stuck in his craw was that his speeches were more fluff than substance — that they were, in Patrick’s telling, “just words.” So he devised an artful response.
” ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal’ — just words,” Patrick said at a rally in Roxbury right before Election Day. ” ‘We have nothing to fear but fear itself’ — just words. . . . ‘I have a dream’ — just words. They’re all just words.”
The crowd erupted as it got Patrick’s point about the power of language. But perhaps no one at the rally understood the point better than Barack Obama, who had joined him on stage that night.
Not five months later, Obama, his presidential campaign gaining steam, had this to say about legendary Chicago organizer Saul Alinsky in The New Republic: “Sometimes the tendency in community organizing of the sort done by Alinsky was to downplay the power of words and of ideas when in fact ideas and words are pretty powerful. ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, all men are created equal.’ Those are just words. ‘I have a dream.’ Just words.”
Aha! So Obama didn’t exactly plagiarize Deval Patrick last week in Wisconsin — he plagiarized himself in The New Republic, plagiarizing Deval Patrick. Glad we’ve got that cleared up! đŸ˜‰
http://blogs.abcnews.com/polit…
That both borrow from one another frequently, and as a result the whens and hows of what they borrowed get mixed up. The point is, it’s all with a clear level of acceptance one candidate to another. Everybody in MA knows this – I can’t think of how many times we’ve made the connection before. The rest of the country is just slow to pick up on it, and they consider it plagiarism somehow, when it’s clearly not.
is really an idiot. One of the worst out there, IMHO. It’s really true, as afertig notes, that every time some non-MA-based reporter notices a similarity between Obama’s and Patrick’s words, they think they’ve invented the wheel or something. When all they had to do was read BMG!
Why don’t we get a cross-link on the DailyKos. All these other “blue” sites do and seeing how we have been pretty relevant of late it would seem like we should do as well.
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p>Any thoughts on that from our editors? Are we too local to make the cut or do we not want the profile because it may bring in a lot of new yahoos in? Just wondering..
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of Deval has proved more than a little apt, at least thus far.
that DP hasn’t done anything in his first year in office? It’s been rebutted it seems like hundreds of times on BMG already. Even I, the deepest of the died-in-the-wool Deval supporters, am bored with the argument.
…I voted for Gov. Patrick and I cringed at much of the last year.
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p>It is not that he didn’t get anything accomplished, he did.
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p>The problem is the fact that he made every freshman mistake in the book and invented a couple new ones at that.
so as to maximize the return on his learning curve!
A bit of background for the uninitiated. Going back to the Richard Dawkins book the Selfish Gene: The point of memes is that they are self-replicating units of information and knowledge. The people who repeat them are “replicating” them, analogous to replication of genes and the information therein. The memes travel on their own, because our brains are wired that way. Often we find it hard to remember where they came from, or if something is useful/eloquent we want to repeat it too. True they have sources, but if a meme is a good one, it can take on a life of its own.
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p>The irony here is so great: “I have a dream” and “Nothing to fear but fear itself” are great memes that have moved through millions if not billions of minds. “Just words” is a new meme describing the transformative power of those memes. Its a good meme too, people like it: thousands cheer (excuse my Bowl America commerical meme/reference for any other DC folks). I think its nice to see Deval’s influence on Obama.
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p>I think plagarism is different from memes. Plagarism is when someone mindlessly copies a bunch of text word for word out of laziness.
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p>This is a meme about memes being criticized for being replicated. I love it. Thoughtfully spreading memes, in this ironic case a meme about the power of great memes, is human nature.
I’m still hoping someone will cut and paste a few of Obama’s words and explain what the inspiring message actually is. For example, “we hold these truths” means “rights come from God and all people have equal rights regardless of nobility or class and therefore must form a new nation based on that principle”, “nothing to fear” means “we have to do something about the depression, the worst thing would be to do nothing or it will get worse”, “I have a dream” meant “we will overcome this country’s racism and treat all people equally”. They were all in the context of specific things, they weren’t just empty appeals to mobism. They also weren’t campaign speeches, but all appeals to get together to make a specific change.
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p>Please someone find me Obama’s words and tell me what they mean.
… the story will be either the “Just Words” flap was just hot air or Deval’s lack of accomplishment (as a preview of the Obama administration) will be the sequel coming to you over the next week. I believe we in Massachusetts have known this was coming either in the primary or in the fall campaign but it is coming. Deval’s abandonment of the Clintons was not a savvy move if Hillary prevails given what Deval owes Bill Clinton for advancing his career and I don’t think they will lose much sleep throwing him under the bus to advance her candidacy. But let’s wait till 10:00 to see how it plays out.
Obama was the first liberal, black, progressive candidate with little experience to talk about the audacity of hope and appeal to grander promises of America.
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p>Basically what attracted me the most to Patrick was that his 2006 convention speech reminded me a whole lot of Obamas 2004 speech. They both represented post-partisanship, post-racial, coalition building politics and priorities. They both call to hope and optimism rather than attack and demean their opponents or play partisan warfare.
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p>And Patrick carried the state by nearly 60% of the vote maybe Obama can carry that much of the country. To me their themes are similar even if they tend to borrow each others words. And the fact that they had the same manager, some of the same speechwriters, and talk to each other about politics and rhetoric should dispell these foolish last minute Clinton attacks.
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p>Ironically Clinton claims she is better suited since she has had more mud thrown at her, but I thank her for testing Obama since she has thrown mud and the kitchen sink at him and he has only done better. McCain wont be any worse than Clinton has.
…be true –
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p>But is irrelevant since the worst of it will come from PAC’s and others, not McCain.
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p>It seems that this race is now his to loose, but you are kidding yourself if you think he’s seen the worst of it.
As far as Deval’s concerned this all has to be win-win. He’s getting on Good Morning America, he’s mentioned in a half a million news stories. People think Obama’s quite an orator and now many who never heard of Patrick but know Obama used “his” language will think he must be quite an orator as well.
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p>And Obama keeps winning. If he gets the nom he’s gonna remember his brother from Boston and owe him something. Let’s recall that when Patrick endorsed Obama all the tea leaf readers were calling the race for Clinton – she was up by 30 in the polls and people wondered if Obama was “just words”. Patrick came out for him against the tide – a tribute to his guts and lack of self-calculation. And now he’s getting credit for his words too. GO DEVAL!!
I was keeling over laughing at how they got Vanilla Ice spliced in here.
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