From Politico:

On Tuesday afternoon, a rival campaign began circulating another pair of videos Obama echoing Patrick, who at the time was running for Massachusetts governor.

This time, Obama is reading from notes or a text. In the instance that drew a charge of plagiarism from Clinton’s campaign earlier this week, the senator was apparently ad-libbing — the remark did not appear in the text released by his campaign.

Deval Patrick on June 3, 2006:

“I am not asking anybody to take a chance on me. I’m asking you to take a chance on your own aspirations.”

Barack Obama on Nov. 2, 2007

“I’m not just asking you to take a chance on me. I’m also asking you to take a chance on your own aspirations.”

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Katrina vanden Heuvel, the editor of The Nation magazine, told Chris Matthews today on Hardball that Sen. Barack Obama’s plagiarism scandal should not have been covered on the program because, she feels, it doesn’t matter to the common person. An incredulous Matthews responded that she should ask Sen. Joe Biden whether these kind of issues matter — a reference to Biden being forced to quit his bid for the presidency in 1987 after he plagiarised a speech. Pat Buchanan, a guest on the show, said that he felt this was a “bad day” for Obama, and that his character will likely be called into question more often now in the campaign.

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“I really don’t think this is too big of a deal,” Sen. Barack Obama said this afternoon to a reporter in Ohio after he seemingly admitted to plagiarizing a 2006 speech by Gov. Deval Patrick.

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In a press conference call on Monday, Sen. Hillary Clinton’s communications director Howard Wolfson noted that Sen. Barack Obama has used Gov. Deval Patrick’s words “without attribution.” Sen. Joe Biden was forced to drop out of the 1988 campaign for president for partaking in a similar practice.

“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,” Wolfson 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.”

Rep. Jim McGovern has released the following statement: “…When Sen. Obama uses [those words] and doesn’t credit their origin, those same words seem less inspiring…”

Earlier: Obama Caught Plagiarizing 2006 Speech?

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From the New York Times today:

Senator Barack Obama adapted one of his signature arguments — that his oratory amounts to more than inspiring words — from speeches given by Gov. Deval Patrick of Massachusetts during his 2006 campaign.

Earlier: Obama Caught Plagiarizing 2006 Speech?

MSNBC Downplays Obama Plagiarism Scandal

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In yet another strange twist to how the MSNBC network is covering the 2008 presidential elections, about ten minutes after 11:00 a.m. ET on Monday, an anchor briefly mentioned on-air the plagiarism controversy involving Sen. Barack Obama’s recycling of a 2006 speech by Gov. Deval Patrick. However, instead of detailing the very similar speeches, the MSNBC anchor immediately noted that Obama and Patrick have said they are close friends and regularly share lines.

The story was not explained to viewers further, and video clips comparing the similarities of the speeches were not aired. It also was not explained that even if Obama and Patrick are friends, that doesn’t mean Obama is allowed to present Patrick’s words as his own to unsuspecting audiences.

Whether MSNBC can present serious coverage of the Obama campaign has been questioned by many critics of the network to date. Some have noted that one of MSNBC’s top personalities, Mika Brzezinski, has at least two family members consulting and/or working for the Obama campaign.

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Big Head DC has discovered alarming similarities between a speech made by Sen. Barack Obama on February 16 while campaigning for president in Wisconsin and an October 2006 speech made by Deval Patrick, the current Democratic governor of Massachusetts. The coincidences would seem to indicate that Obama copied several lines and linguistic speech patterns from Patrick’s “Just Words” speech for Obama’s own “Words Matter” speech. Indeed, words do matter. And they matter even more when they are one’s own words.

The two speeches can be compared, in all their eerie detail, via YouTube:

Deval Patrick’s 2006 “Just Words” speech (October 15, 2006):

And Barack Obama’s “Words Matter” speech (February 16, 2008):

Plagiarizing a speech during a presidential campaign was enough to end Sen. Joe Biden’s first bid for the presidency. From Wikipedia:

In 1987, Joe Biden ran as a Democratic presidential candidate. When the campaign began, he was considered a frontrunner because of his moderate image. However, the campaign ended when he was accused of plagiarizing a speech by Neil Kinnock, then-leader of the British Labour Party. Though Biden had correctly credited the original author in all speeches but one, the one where he failed to make mention of the originator was caught on video. In the video Biden is filmed repeating a stump speech by Kinnock, with only minor modifications.

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