lawsuit filed in federal court against Obama and Axelrod.

In Politics, Inspiration or Plagiarism Is a Fine Line

By SAM ROBERTS
Published: February 20, 2008

The accusation on Monday by Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s campaign that Senator Barack Obama recently plagiarized a passage from a speech delivered two years ago by a friend has opened a door to charges and countercharges about borrowed phrases and unattributed inspiration in the 2008 campaign.

But it also revived questions raised in 1993 about whether President Bill Clinton, in his Inaugural Address, borrowed references to springtime from two sources without crediting them at the time.

Mr. Clinton began his inaugural by proclaiming: “Today we celebrate the mystery of American renewal. This ceremony is held in the depth of winter. But, by the words we speak and the faces we show the world, we force the spring. A spring reborn in the world’s oldest democracy, that brings forth the vision and courage to reinvent America.”

A few days earlier, the president-elect said that in drafting his address he had drawn on a number of sources, including a four-page outline by the Rev. Timothy S. Healy, president of the New York Public Library. Elaborating a decade later in his autobiography, Mr. Clinton recalled that he was dissatisfied with the latest draft of his address, but added:

“I did like one passage, built around the idea that our new beginning had ‘forced the spring’ to come to America on this cold winter day. It was the brainchild of my friend Father Tim Healy, former president of Georgetown University. Tim had died suddenly of a heart attack while walking through Newark airport a few weeks after the election. When friends went to his apartment, they found in his typewriter the beginning of a letter to me that included suggested language for the inaugural speech. His phrase ‘force the spring’ struck all of us, and I wanted to use it in his memory.”

Mr. Clinton incorporated the phrase, but did not credit Father Healy by name.

A few days after the 1993 inauguration, Jimmy Breslin wrote in his Newsday column, “When Healy sent Clinton that phrase it was with the idea that he would be alive and that he would hear Clinton say, ‘In the words of the Rev. Tim Healy …’ ”

Earlier on Inauguration Day, Mr. Clinton attended a prayer service where another friend, the Rev. Gardner C. Taylor, pastor emeritus of Concord Baptist Church in Brooklyn, delivered a sermon in which he said: “On this fateful day, we enter a springtime, we believe, of a new beginnings. There may be spring rains and storms, but it is springtime in America.”

Mr. Breslin wrote at the time that Mr. Taylor in his morning sermon “was unknowingly providing more thoughts and phrases for the speech.” Somebody had announced that Mr. Clinton “had finished his Inaugural Address at four in the morning,” the column continued, “which appears incorrect.”

Howard Wolfson, one of Mrs. Clinton’s top advisers, said Tuesday: “Tim Healy helped President Clinton write the speech by offering suggestions for it. That doesn’t fit any definition of plagiarism that I’m familiar with — no one is accusing Senator Obama of lifting speeches from one of his speechwriters or advisers.”

On Monday, Mr. Wolfson accused Mr. Obama of plagiarizing the remarks of Gov. Deval Patrick of Massachusetts from a 2006 campaign appearance. Mr. Obama acknowledged that he should have credited his friend Mr. Patrick in speech on Saturday in Milwaukee, but he said the Clinton campaign was “carrying it too far.”

I’m a Hillary supporter, but I am now outwardly critical of the way she has campaigned. Her communications person SUCKS! So many missed opportunities and just plain WRONG responses.