She's lost half the states in this country already.

People can decide for themselves if they think this is important or not...but how is not the same thing as what Biden did in 1988?

I think the fact that the speech is from Patrick makes it a hundred times worse.

He's only the second African-American to be elected to the office of Governor. He's a trailblazer in his own right and Obama, regardless of the nature of their friendship, "borrows" his thunder and passes it off as his own.

You do realize that Patrick "borrowed" much of the stuff from Barack's 2004 address at the Democratic Convention when he ran his campaign for governor, don't you? They've both admitted that they are close friends and David Axelrod manages both of them and that they constantly exchange ideas.

what did he do?

So should Patrick's name then be on the ballot in November?

you guys are barking up the wrong tree.

It's not that he stole or borrowed or loaned or was inspired by Patrick's words, that's not the issue. It's that Obama, the man of grand ideas and great speeches, may not be as original and infallible as he seemed last week. Sure as day, there's a chink in his armor.

clinton has stolen her whole campaign off bill clinton, should he be on the ballot and not her?

I'm an English graduate student, and in our department, plagiarism is the gravest of sins, and reason enough to expel someone. Whether Patrick gave Obama permission or not is ENTIRELY unimportant; the moment Obama passed off those words as his own without citing Patrick, he plagiarized. And you cannot randomly come up with something so eerily similar. That's complete bollocks. It is absurd to think that two politicians could separately come up with the idea to counteract the exact phrase "just words" with several exactly similar quotes.

And the "everybody else does it" excuse doesn't fly; so what if everyone else does it? They're all wrong. If Obama is held to a different standard, it is because he has set himself up as being, with respect to his language, different from the status quo. Words is all he's got; it's what has enabled him to inspire people. You don't really have that with Clinton or McCain (I'd say Huckabee is the closest), neither of whom are very good speakers.

But whatever. This is business as usual.

Whether this is a big deal or not, it's no big deal compared to Clinton's assertion that any state she loses is "no big deal". She's lost half the states in this country already.