Unoriginal Sins of the Candidates’ Speeches

It might have seemed familiar to Dan Lungren, the line that burbled out recently as he pondered how the next governor of California would deal with the state’s projected population spurt.

“We’re going to have probably 18 million Californians, additional Californians, here between now and the year 2025,” the Republican nominee said. “Eighteen million! That’s the equivalent of all of New York moving here.”

Had Democrat Al Checchi been in the audience, the line would have seemed more than familiar, for he had uttered strikingly similar words almost every day of his campaign for governor, which ended in defeat in June. He had even said it in front of Lungren, at a debate both attended in May.

In any other environment, such as academia, the word would have gone out: Stop, thief!

But this is politics, where the normal rules do not apply. Indeed, not even Checchi objected to the recycling. He took it as a compliment. Perhaps he had little pride of authorship because he had swiped the line from a newspaper story.

It may go without saying that the political world is a universe apart. That holds even when it comes to the coin of the political realm, the words and images that candidates use to sell themselves. Those raised on romanticized notions of Lincoln-Douglas debates and fireside chats may see political wordsmithing as a window onto a politician’s soul--and sometimes it is. And sometimes, it is just another way to win on election day, and anything goes.

Any way you look at it, rhetorical theft is a time-honored political tradition, involving many of the landmark lines delivered by American politicians.

Franklin Roosevelt’s declaration that we have nothing to fear but fear itself? Swiped, with some tinkering, from Epictetus, circa AD 100, and a clatch of others.

John F. Kennedy’s defining call to “ask not what your country can do for you”? Borrowed, after a fashion, from an 1884 address by Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

This year, California Senate candidate Matt Fong created an epic morphing of borrowed political lines in his first debate with incumbent Barbara Boxer, managing to fuse the signature phrases of Martin Luther King Jr. and Ronald Reagan into one sentence. To be fair, he credited King. One could argue that he need not have credited Reagan, who had lifted his pet phrase from words uttered by pilgrim John Winthrop as he gazed toward a glittering American shore in 1630.

America’s challenge, Fong said, is to unite its citizens. “This will take us to Dr. King’s mountaintop, which will raise America to new heights to become that shining city on a hill,” he declared.

No one involved in politics is surprised by the lack of originality.

“There are not a lot of new ideas,” said Darry Sragow, a Democratic strategist and speech writer. “When somebody gets one, it’s going to be stolen.”

Which itself is not an original thought, as the historian Herodotus could attest. “There are no new ideas under the sun,” he said a mere 2,400 years ago.

To the cynic, hardly anything about a political campaign seems original, including the candidates. They can all look the same, blow-dried and conservatively attired, spouting the same campaign slogans and, in California at least, doffing their jackets to ponder the ocean surf in their copycat television ads.

Even so, it would be understandable to expect their words to be original. But, to borrow from former President Richard Nixon, that would be wrong.

The Sincerest Form of Flattery?

Though speech writers are uniformly horrified by it, some politicians seem to regard lifting words not as plagiarism, but as high praise. It takes an exaggerated burglary to draw shame, like that visited upon Delaware Sen. Joseph Biden during his ill-fated run for the 1988 presidential nomination.

Biden ultimately was forced out of the Democratic contest after it became known that he had lifted sections of a speech from a biographical address by British Labor Party leader Neil Kinnock, and had also aped speeches by fellow Democrats Robert F. Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey. The error was amplified by the fact that, because of the reach of television, viewers were able to see Kinnock and Biden’s videotaped words back-to-back.

The senator, according to rhetorician Mary Stuckey of the University of Mississippi, proved that even in politics, there are limits to what one can get away with.

“He lifted whole passages,” she said. “There’s a difference between that and swiping a phrase in mid-campaign. . . . If you take someone’s signature lines, it will not play. If you lift entire passages so the other campaign says “Plagiarism!’, you’re dead.”

But the occasional swiped lines, like those by Lungren, Fong and many others, inhabit a gray area between original thought and abject, Bidenesque plagiarism. They fall between the cracks largely unseen--and largely accepted.

Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr., echoed the Bible. Ronald Reagan aped movies--including the Gipper’s own--modern literature, Shakespeare and his fellow politicians. He used Winthrop’s “shining city” line for 30 years, as have no fewer than four national candidates since Reagan revived it.

“Everything is acceptable--it’s politics, after all,” said Democratic political consultant Kam Kuwata. “What’s important is what works.”

Sometimes the verbal misdemeanors are intentional and sometimes they are quite the opposite--a consequence of people coming to the same conclusion in embarrassingly similar words.

“The truth is that when you run for office, every candidate is operating in the same environment, with the same concerns among voters,” said Democratic consultant Sragow. “There are a fixed number of solutions, programs and rhetoric, and the scope of public discussion is quite narrow. There’s not going to be much originality.”

Speech writers, too, operate in somewhat insular surroundings, steeping themselves in the same literature and lilting words, and it can sometimes get downright confusing which thoughts are original and which are not.

Some Honest Mistakes

“Symbols and illusions and similes and metaphors, they all pile in there, and sometimes the computer in your brain doesn’t separate them out,” said Ken Khachigian, formerly a speech writer for President Reagan and other Republicans. He cites the pressure for originality as a leading cause of burnout among he and his peers.

Once, Khachigian said, he labored over a speech for Gov. George Deukmejian, including in it the line that “justice delayed is justice denied.”

“I thought that was original,” said Khachigian. “Subsequently, I read it 100 times in [previous] speeches.”

Khachigian also figured in one of the more blatant, if initially accidental, rhetorical recyclings. In 1984, searching for a theme for President Reagan’s 1984 reelection campaign, he included in Reagan’s Labor Day kickoff speech an anecdote first delivered by Dwight Eisenhower. The kicker of the anecdote: “You ain’t seen nothin’ yet.”

Reagan delivered it as written, citing Eisenhower by name. By the time the campaign ended, the president was so fond of quoting Ike that he was using the line to close his speeches.

It turned out the line really came from entertainer Al Jolson.

“I stole it, but I quoted Eisenhower,” said Khachigian, laughing at the turn of events. “I’m not sure I realized it was Jolson’s. . . . We stole it fair and square.”

On election night that year, he bumped into Dodger manager Tommy Lasorda, who good-naturedly berated Khachigian. Lasorda told him “you ain’t seen nothin’ yet” had been the best-received line in his motivational speeches--but now, Lasorda’s audiences thought he was swiping from Reagan.

“So, it’s a theft of a theft of a theft,” Khachigian said. A footnote: Recently, Khachigian heard a political speech. “As Ronald Reagan said,” the politician intoned, “you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.”

But lifts are not always accidental. These days, when some politicians will use any weapon to broaden their reach among voters, it is not surprising when rhetoric is part of the arsenal.

In 1992, candidate Bill Clinton took to regularly swiping the lines of his Democratic opponents to broaden his attraction to their supporters, like a giant amoeba intent on swallowing the competition.

He borrowed the phrase “fundamental change” from Sen. Bob Kerrey, who had uttered it so often that campaign-watchers rolled their eyes every time Kerrey voiced the first syllable. Clinton copped a set of lines--”It’s your country! Take it back!”--from former California Gov. Edmund G. (Jerry) Brown Jr., who also ran that year.

He even absconded with a few sentences used by his general election opponent, President Bush, changing them slightly before injecting them into his Democratic convention acceptance speech.

“Now that we’ve changed the world, it’s time to change America,” Clinton said, aping some familiar Bush lines.

Bush complained good-naturedly, but he had little room to gripe. Four years earlier, smarting from a loss in the Iowa caucuses to then-Sen. Bob Dole, Bush swiped Dole’s sales pitch--”I’m one of you”--and used it to fight his way back to victory in the New Hampshire primary.

Some rhetoricians question whether any of this is accidental.

“Most political speeches are carefully crafted documents,” said USC communications professor Thomas Hollihan. “The sentences are tested in focus groups and in polling . . . so taking an argument of another candidate is not just co-opting the original, but it’s an explicit appeal to all the constituent audiences out there that those lines were tested on.”

In a sense, it is simply good economics to borrow a line that has already proven to work for an opponent--much in the same way that it is cheaper, if not artistically honorable, for Hollywood to remake a popular movie rather than come up with something fresh.

Echoes of Greatness

But in politics, there can be another reason politicians skate close to the edge of plagiarism: They want to sound like the giants of the profession, so that, in rhetorician Stuckey’s words, “they can bask in others’ reflected glory.”

At the time of the Persian Gulf War, President Bush’s speeches carried the unmistakable echo of Franklin Roosevelt’s World War II addresses. Stuckey recalls marveling at how Bush’s words played on the memories held by her own mother, who was in high school during World War II.

“Any time a president is talking in crisis, they’re talking [like] Roosevelt and Lincoln,” says Stuckey, who is not offended by that sort of rhetorical echoing. “Those are our crisis guys. There are not going to be any Millard Fillmore-ish moments.”

Rhetorician Martin Medhurst of Texas A&M; says resonance like that is important, if difficult to pull off.

“You can get the same effect without using the same words,” he said. “If you can remind people of the idea you want to get across and some previous person’s way of expressing [it], there’s a real art to that.”

Those who study political speeches issue two cautions: Copycats should stay away from heralded lines--whose use would only prompt guffaws--and should only occasionally swipe, lest they appear to have no sense of self.

Lungren did not step into either category with his use of the line so often spoken by Checchi. While known to those familiar with the race for California governor, the words had certainly not set the world on fire. It was, rhetoricians and political analysts suggested, simply a way to describe the projected growth of California in words that could break through voter ennui.

Lungren, for his part, said he came up with the line himself about the 18 million coming Californians--and the comparison to the size of New York state.

“The census was something that was out there,” he said in an interview. “The idea about New York is something that I picked up. ‘Eighteen million. That’s New York!’ I’ve been trying to think of ways of conveying the size and the scope of the challenges of California.”

But in front of Lungren, in a candidate debate held at The Times, Checchi had opined about the same subject in nearly the same language:

“There are going to be 18 million more people here in the next 25 years,” Checchi said in May, repeating lines that were a routine element of his speeches. “We’re going to grow an entire New York state.”

Checchi, asked recently where he got the idea, gave credit to The Times, which indeed had used it in two stories, in August 1997 and March 1998. The stories’ author, Times reporter Faye Fiore, passed on the credit, saying the comparison was suggested to her by an aide to U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein.

The Feinstein aide, not surprisingly, said the idea brewed in the mind of his boss alone.

The only question, to speech writers and rhetoricians, is not whether it gets used again--as it inevitably will--but by whom. After all, said Khachigian, the former Reagan speech writer:

“Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. As someone said.”