I promise I will not make a habit of defending Barack Obama. So please view what follows as not a defense of Obama but rather a plea that McCain partisans concentrate their criticism in the right places. The above YouTube has been making the rounds today. It shows a bunch of similarities between Barack Obama’s speech last night and Mario Cuomo’s legendary oration at the 1984 Democratic Convention. The conclusion some are drawing is that the similarities show Obama to be an empty suit as he apparently plagiarizes his high flying rhetoric from other sources. First he tapped Deval Patrick, now Mario Cuomo. But the inference of plagiarism regarding last night’s speech is neither fair nor fitting. All Democrats talk this way, and they’ve been doing it for decades. In their respective speeches, Obama and Cuomo both trotted out liberal archetypes. Using specific examples, they personified poor people who had encountered difficulties due to Republican indifference to their plight. They talked about folks like the impoverished Appalachian coal miner as Cuomo did or the hapless guy being run into bankruptcy by his sister’s medical bills that Obama featured. But Obama and Cuomo don’t have a monopoly on the style. John Edwards did the same thing. So did Chris Dodd, Dennis Kucinich, Joe Biden and Al Gore. Remember the woman that Gore kept talking about who due to Republican malefactors took doggie medicine? At least I think that’s how the yarn went. I’m not really sure who started this Democratic rhetorical style. It may well have been Cuomo. Even if Cuomo was merely following in the footsteps of a giant like Fritz Mondale, he perfected the art. His 1984 convention address was so effective, he would have been the presumptive frontrunner for the Democratic nomination in ’88 if he had chosen to run. If Cuomo perfected this kind of fundamentally silly speech, Obama has elevated it. It’s a testament to Obama’s gifts that such exhausted rhetoric sounds almost fresh when he delivers it. So what’s the takeaway here? It’s not that Obama is a plagiarist. It’s unfair to call Obama a plagiarist just because he speaks like every Democrat has since time immemorial. But the fact that the Democratic party’s nominee in 2008 effectively repeats the same canards that haven’t been state of the art since 1984 says something rather profound about the party’s intellectual state. You could say that this all means the Democrats haven’t come up with any new ideas since 1984, but that understates their intellectual bankruptcy. In Cuomo’s speech, there weren’t any ideas, just emotions. If you look at Obama’s speech last night, the same thing applies. Obama may have thought it was a big deal that he promised to find jobs for the jobless, but this is the kind of empty promise that makes the promisor feel good but will do nothing for the promisee. So Obama’s sin isn’t cribbing old ideas, for there are no ideas to crib. He is a product of his party, a party that hasn’t come up with a fresh idea or a fresh means of expression since Mario Cuomo was a rising star. The fact that Obama peddles exhausted liberal tropes doesn’t make him a plagiarist. But that those liberal tropes make up the core of his political philosophy is something the American public should know.
