American political seasons are always rife with plagiarism, and it’s almost always the same thing: Campaigns poach each others’ boilerplate (hideously mixed metaphor, but UD will go with it). That is, in what UD would call a “party-lateral” move, a democrat running in Iowa will steal a paragraph describing a candidate’s position on, say, immigration, from another democrat running for office, typically in some other state. You want to stay out of your own state, since greater geographical distance tends to mean less chance of detection. (So, by the way, does greater temporal distance. UD has covered tons of plagiarism cases where the plagiarist found a dusty tome appearing in 1950 …)
Nothing special, then, about an Iowa democrat having plagiarized website material from the website material of an Illinois democrat. But UD likes her campaign manager’s defense: Plagiarized writing is a placeholder. When you’re writing, you distribute plagiarized paragraphs here and there as a temporary measure. While you pull your own prose together. Even if that material gets published, it’s not really plagiarism, because you were always intending to discard it for something more permanent.
May 6th, 2014 at 8:55AM
Doesn’t calling this “plagiarism” tend to devalue the term? Even in our non-parliamentary system, candidates of a given political party are more or less expected to share certain positions – and there have been concerted efforts (advocated, at least on the Democratic side, by respected academics) to develop standard language to express those positions.
The defense seems to me not only stupid but unnecessary.
May 6th, 2014 at 9:03AM
Mr Punch: Well, but I don’t think we tolerate very well position language going out over an individual’s name. If you’re quoting the party platform, that’s fine. But I’d argue that language that appears on your website without any sign of it coming from someone else’s website, or from an official document, is plagiarism.