“These were common words and values,” Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort said, defending Melania Trump from the charge that she plagiarized Michelle Obama’s 2008 convention speech.
How common were they? It’s fair to say Michelle Obama wasn’t the first person to use those phrases
Michelle in 2008 begin her list of virtues with the phrase “you work hard for what you want in life.” You can find that exact wording used in a 1995 Singapore newspaper article on a pig farmer’s daughter: “She was taught early in life that there is no free lunch. ‘You work hard for what you want in life,’ was what her father told her.”
Michelle in 2008 used the words, “Your word is your bond, and you do what you say you’re going to do.”
Those same exact words appeared in a 2007 article in the trade journal Law Enforcement Technology.
The odds are pretty high that the Obama campaign didn’t plagiarize the Straits Times and Law Enforcement Technology. The point is that these are trite platitudes, and if a thousand people use the same platitude, some will use it identically.
What makes Melania’s speech so striking is that she used the same exact platitudes as Michelle, in the same exact order, with only minuscule variation of the words. It’s way too similar to be a coincidence.
But the least charitable interpretation — that Melania and her speechwriters simply lifted the lines knowingly from Obama — is almost too scummy to believe.
So if we judge rank theft and pure coincidence as too unlikely, what’s left?
Rank sloppiness.
Most likely, scriptwriters compiled notes from past first-lady speeches, and they really liked Michelle’s lines. Somewhere along the way, those words probably slipped from the “here was a good line someone used” pile to the “here’s a line we should use” pile.
If that’s the case, a normal campaign would quickly admit it, apologize to Michelle, fire or transfer the junior speechwriter and move on. This isn’t a normal campaign.
Timothy P. Carney, The Washington Examiner’s senior political columnist, can be contacted at [email protected]. His column appears Tuesday and Thursday nights on washingtonexaminer.com.
