The Republican Governors Association on Tuesday released an ad questioning the integrity of Wisconsin Democratic gubernatorial candidate Mary Burke. The new commercial states that her campaign’s plagiarism scandal raises serious questions about her character.
The Democratic businesswoman and Harvard Business School graduate was forced earlier this month to fire her consultant Eric Schnurer after BuzzFeed reported that huge portions of her so-called “jobs plan” were lifted directly from other candidates in other states.
Burke’s campaign team has since added citations to jobs plan and has tried repeatedly to return her campaign’s focus to defeating incumbent Gov. Scott Walker in the Nov. 4 midterm elections. But naturally, Republicans are making as big a deal of it as possible.
“I don’t think they were teaching plagiarism at Harvard Business School. I don’t think they were teaching you to cut and paste other peoples’ work and call it your own,” Republican Governors Association chairman Gov. Chris Christie, R-N.J., said Monday at a Walker campaign event. “If you can’t trust her honesty and her integrity when she tells you that this is her plan, why would you trust her honesty and integrity on anything else she tells you about what she’ll do for Wisconsin or about Scott’s record?”
The even more obvious problem for Burke, which the ad tries to highlight, is just how seriously she takes the issue of jobs if her campaign just cut and pasted her jobs plan from other candidates so that she could say on camera that she has one.
Burke maintains that the plagiarized jobs plan did not “violate her principles,” according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
“When you put together economic development plans, this is about bringing in the best ideas,” she said. “And this is not anything more than bringing good ideas to Wisconsin, to the plans on how I’m going to move Wisconsin forward. And in describing some of these ideas, similar language was used by the consultant that was used in those ideas that he incorporated in other candidates’ plans.”
Walker currently holds a very small 47-46 lead over Burke, a statistical tie between the two gubernatorial candidates, according to the latest polling data from Real Clear Politics.
