THE FOOTNOTE VOTE

THE FOOTNOTE VOTE 

She has lost men. She has lost women, She has lost blacks. She has lost yuppies. She has lost the college vote and the high school vote. She is losing the union vote. She is in trouble. 

But we now know that Hillary in fact does have a firewall. 

It is the footnote vote! 

For the past few weeks, Mrs. Clinton has repeated the charge that Barack Obama is something of a plagiarist. This is because he has repeated lines given him by Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick. The lines skewer those who claim Obama's speeches are "just words," with repeated invocations of some of the American republic's more famous bonne mots, followed by sarcastic questions that mockingly wonder whether these past clarion calls were just words as well. The riff works its magic as the audience hears Barack intone "'We hold those truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal.' Just words? 'We have nothing to fear but fear itself.' Just words? 'I have a dream'. Just words?" There is a kind of game, set and match quality to this oratory, as there is with most of what comes out of Obama's mouth, before crowds larger than anyone else's and more enthusiastic by an order of magnitude. 

Alas, however, the "just words" riff was not original to Barack. It was Gov. Patrick's. To the Clintonistas, it is irrlevant that Patrick is one of Obama's national co-chairs, or that he specifically suggested that Obama use the lines, or that Obama admits he perhaps should have credited Patrick for them at some point along the way, however that is done on the campaign trail. No, Barack the policy neophyte now turns out to be, so they say, less than the Demosthenes we had all supposed him to be. And since, so the argument continues, words are so much a part of his appeal, perhaps he is less . . . appealing. 

Obama has pilloried this contretemps as "silly" and he is right. But apart from being silly, the charges being levelled say a lot more about his critics than they do about him. Over the course of the past few decades, we have collectively allowed our politics to be reduced to a sort of least common denominator sport. In that arena, the subtext is that smart doesn't matter and eloquence is phony. The current President touted his regular guy quality and C+ college average as evidence that he was the better candidate in both 2000 and 2004, disqualifying in one pass anyone who excelled in school or gave a syntactically correct speech. Words were a currency to be debased, not embraced, as W winked and nodded his way through malaprops while the ostensibly effete Ivy Leaguers "misunderestimated" him. He didn't care whether "nuclear" came out as "nucular," so long as everyone knew the regular guy from Crawford would kill the SOBs and not worry much about the sensitivities intellectuals had about things like, say, torture. 

There is a sense in which Hillary is stealing a page from this book. No one -- not even Hillary -- believes Obama is a plagiarist. He was given a line by a supporter and used it. From time to time, she has done the same thing, as has everyone else who has ever run for office. Plagiarists steal words and claim them as their own. No one stole anything here. Deval Patrick willingly gave them away; much like the legions of speechwriters who craft the eloquence most of our politicians claim as their own. 

For Hillary, the Obama problem is not where the words come from, it's that the words are so good. She cannot attack them. So she has spent the better part of the last two weeks trying to undermine them. The "they are not his words" charge followed the "they are just words charge," and then was itself followed by her "why can't we be friends" caricature of a putatively naive Obama long on rhetoric and short on reality. The problem, however, is that Hillary is morphing into everyone she claims to oppose -- the master mocker himself is the current President Bush, who has made a career out of ranking out opponents (be they members of the media or suitors for the same job) for their brains and eloquence, and the GOP playbook this Fall, lacking a defensible record, will belittle Obama for his vocabulary and cadence because it won't be able to attack him for his plans and policies. 

 Et tu, Hillary? 

Hillary Clinton is a lot better than this and should rise to that level rather than sink to Rove's. The Presidential race is a political campaign, not the defense of an honors thesis. 

Footnotes don't matter.