Friday, September 19, 2014

Plagiarism or Boilerplate

I haven't written much about the governor's race in Wisconsin, but I am watching it with interest. Scott Walker has done well in his four years, but those who hate him really, really, really, really, really hate him, so it's been a fairly close race. Now comes word that his challenger, Mary Burke, might not exactly be an original thinker:
Large portions of Wisconsin Democratic gubernatorial candidate Mary Burke’s jobs plan for Wisconsin appear to be copied directly from the plans of three Democratic candidates who ran for governor in previous election cycles.

Burke’s economic plan “Invest for Success” copies nearly-verbatim sections from the jobs plans of Ward Cammack, who ran for Tennessee governor in 2009 before withdrawing from the race, a 2008 plan from Delaware Gov. Jack Markell, and John Gregg who ran for governor of Indiana in 2012 and lost to Mike Pence.
BuzzFeeder Andrew Kaczynski reproduces some representative samples, which indicate that Burke did pretty much lift a lot of material verbatim from other candidates. A few thoughts:

  • Are we surprised by this? Really? The Democrats have been using terms like "invest" for years, even though their notion of investing is actually channeling money to their clients. If you call it boilerplate language, you're getting closer to the truth.
  • If plagiarism is a hanging offense, no one bothered to tell Joe Biden.
  • The larger issue is that Democrats haven't had a new economic idea in half a century. I've always found it amusing that they call themselves progressives, since they are essentially reactionary in everything they do. Heck, their playbook against Walker isn't much different than what we saw in a certain town back east in 1692.

The most recent polling indicates that Walker has a narrow lead, which is about what you might expect, given the outright hatred the Blue Fist brigade has for Walker. There are still a lot of people in the Badger State who sound this way:


No politician in the past few years has had to overcome more scurrility than Scott Walker.

1 comment:

Bike Bubba said...

Given that the progressive left plagiarizes from Marx quite a bit, who's surprised that they're doing so from each other?

And I almost wonder if this is just a strategy to get eyes off the more relevant question; anybody ever seen what happens to a society when you use Marx's ideas? 'taint pretty.