Hillary also ripped off a page of Joe Klein's Primary Colors

[IndianaGreen]

Who you calling a plagiarist?
21 Feb 2008 10:47 pm

During the debate, Dan Drezner suggested to me over IM that Hillary Clinton was plagiarizing Primary Colors. He backs it up on his own blog:

Hillary Clinton, February 21, 2008 debate with Barack Obama: "You know, lifting whole passages from someone else's speeches is not change you can believe in, it's change you can Xerox." Hillary Clinton, later on in the same debate: "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." Jack Stanton speech, in Primary Colors (New York: Random House, 1996), p. 162: "Y'know, I've taken some hits in this campaign. It hasn't been easy for me, or my family. It hasn't been fair, but it hasn't been anything compared to the hits a lot of you take every day."

Meanwhile, Chris Beam at Slate picks up on another instance:

Hillary, however, pivots in a way that evokes, of all things, her Diner Sob. Only this time, she sets herself up: “People often ask me, ‘How do you do it? How do you keep going?’ ” That’s the exact same question asked by Marianne Pernold Young at the Café Espresso in Portsmouth, New Hampshire on the eve of the primary. Clinton then goes into a colorful anecdote about a medical center filled with people injured in Iraq. She doesn’t exactly tear up, but it’s a deliberately emotional moment. (We see Chelsea looking teary afterwards.) At the very end, she borrows a line that John Edwards used toward the end of his campaign. "We're going to be fine," she said, referring to herself and Obama. (Edwards always said it about himself and Elizabeth.) "I just hope we can say the same thing about the American people."

http://meganmcardle.theatlantic.com/archives/2008/02/who_you_calling_a_plagiarist.php

[billbuckhead]

1. I'd say Joe Klein copied the Clintons

[Recursion]

2. "I am small and not so dark"

Or, in German,

"Ich bin klein und nicht sehr schwarzes."

I always thought that was cute.

[CreekDog]

3. He copied Bill Clinton, yes

But Hillary copied Bill Clinton from 1992.

It seems like Hillary is the only one that didn't notice this. Sheesh.

[CreekDog]

7. he copied Bill Clinton

Hillary copied Bill Clinton. No big deal except she really gave it to Barack for "copying" words not even 1 hour earlier.

Bunch of crap.

[KAZ]

10. Oh, so now it's "the Clintons"? Was NAFTA "the Clintons"?

W

[Name removed]

4. Deleted message

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[CreekDog]

5. I'm critical of it being okay for her while she criticizes Obama for the same thing

if she hadn't made an issue of Obama's doing it I would have thought it was a good line to use.

she dug her hole here, don't blame us for catching it.

[Occam Bandage]

8. We're criticizing the ridiculous hypocrisy. She bashes Obama for

using a few lines of Patrick's (at Patrick's request), but yet half of what she's said is recycled from someone else, be it Edwards, Obama, or Bill.

[Alexander]

9. Hypocrite.

[XemaSab]

6. .

LOL

[ellisonz]

11. LOL.

[misanthrope]

12. Glad to see I wasn't the only one who picked that up...

...When I heard the diner line come out of her mouth, I recoiled and thought, "Here it comes."

I noted too that her immediate reference about the public trials of her life were a nod to the one moment in the '90s when her public opinion polls actually shot through the roof, after she was humiliated by her husband. I wondered if she was seeking to somehow summon that subconscious sympathy from the public again.