Well, yes. But I have it on good authority that Sen. Clinton's staff talked her out of saying how much she cares "...about all those wonderful people out there in the dark."

John Edwards also used that line.

Actually, Clinton did quite a bit of borrowing in her closing remarks.

There's even some side by side YouTube - See below - It's well worth watching and passing along.

Examples:

Clinton took from Edwards
http://www.politico.com/blogs/bensmith/0208/An_echo_from_Hillary.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zAYItnI-lPo&eurl=http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2008/2/21/215237/190/114/461598

Clinton took from Bill Clinton
http://www.dailykos.com/comments/2008/2/21/215237/190/163#c163
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/179614.php

The line was from Susan Stanton in their "60 minutes" type interview and it was her saying it, not him.

The only difference in the line from the movie is that in the movie she says "the hits we are taking" and in the debate she said "the hits I have taken".

I love that movie and my ears perked up when I heard that.

Wow... you mean you were actually familiar enough with that book to recognize a lifted line?

And I thought *I* needed to get a life.

re: Russ

This is why it's a very very bad idea for students to commit plagiarism. Academics often have excellent if not near photographic memories for books, and sufficiently impoverished personal lives to have read an awful lot of them.

Obama's entire segment was directly snatched from Patrick's speech...not paraphrased. Hillary's closing was paraphrasing at best.

I think that Hillary has also been paraphrasing the pigs in Animal Farm. However, having no preference for either of these candidates, I must side with Hillary over Barack in the academic honesty debate. Barack Obama says nothing in his speeches, yet he still needs to plagiarize? That is absurd. At least Hillary says things that can be critiqued.

This is childish and becoming incredibly boring.

Very little political speechifying is completely original, how much original can anyone say?

Churchill wrote all his own speeches until the late 1940s. Theodore Roosevelt used himself as chief speechwriter as well.

It's expected today that politicians will have to rely heavily on speechwriters because they don't have time to write, because they may have to address technical issues with which they are not intimately familiar, or because many of their speeches must include material oriented to local audiences. There are also special cases -- Bob Dole was one -- of politicians for whom the act of writing is physically difficult.

But I have to say the thought of a politician who requires speechwriters for everything, all the time, has always made me uncomfortable. While I'm not a great admirer of Sen. Obama, I do give him credit for producing as much of his own material as he does. Repeating another politician's lines without attribution is unwise on his part, for reasons of appearances, but the ethical line between using lines used by another politician and paying a speechwriter to write lines one can use looks pretty indistinct to me.

I guess that your coverage of this inanity means that you've now graduated from a blogger to an MSM journalist.