Beyond The Commons

Aaron Wherry covers all the goings-on in and around Parliament Hill. Follow Aaron on Twitter: @aaronwherry

Categories: Beyond The Commons, Capital Read

BTC: Before we move on

by Aaron Wherry on Friday, October 3, 2008 9:52pm - 39 Comments

Just thinking this through.

So let’s say we’re deciding that the plagiarism of John Howard (and now Mike Harris) doesn’t matter because Stephen Harper didn’t write the speech. If that’s case, do any of Stephen Harper’s speeches, assuming almost all of them are at least partially written by someone else, matter?

If he takes none of the blame, can he receive any of the credit? That doesn’t seem possible. Or rational. So are we collectively making some sort of post-modern decision that political speeches no longer matter? And is that a really enlightened point of view? Or a sign of profound apathy?

Tags: Election Watch, John Howard, Mike Harris, Stephen Harper

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Anon

I think speeches matter. Everybody expects political leaders to have speechwriters. But copying someone else’s speech, line by line, para by para, is just a tad over the line.

At least they haven’t found any of his speeches as PM with external grafts, probably because he no longer writes his own speeches :-)
Andrew

Aaron, I guess the equivocation being used by the apologists is that he doesn’t write the speeches, and therefore didn’t plagiarize, but does agree with the content, and therefore claim the ideas are his. I’m not entirely sure what to make of it.

Shouldn’t our Prime Minister be more than a parrot?
john g

This is ridiculous. We’re talking about 3 sentences in the middle of a speech.

For Christ’s sake, this is not university. I have no problem with some speechwriter borrowing a line or two from other speeches.

Any one of us in our jobs who have to write documents of some kind…how many of you have never lifted a line or two of material from other documents in your workplace? Anyone?

And Canadian Press now has a MAJOR story about how Harper once accepted a pair of cowboy boots from Bush.

Is this what our media has come to? Is this what they think is important???
Anon

“And Canadian Press now has a MAJOR story about how Harper once accepted a pair of cowboy boots from Bush.”

This would be a major story only if (a) these boots were worn by Bush,(b) if Harper kissed them on bended knees, and (c) if it has Muntean-applied lipstick on them.
Matt

If you read the whole CP story, you’ll see that the issue is not that Harper received cowboy boots from Harper, but that he took months to report the gift, in violation of HARPER’S own legislation.

The issue is Harper’s hyprocricy, of which there is enough to fuel many news stories.
sf

“If he takes none of the blame, can he receive any of the credit?”

When, if ever, has he received credit for a speech from this blogger?
Lord Bob

I don’t think the words of political speeches matter. Never have. Do you consciously place votes based on eloquence rather than policy?

Harper’s Howard-based speech was important insofar as it said “I think we should invade Iraq”. The phrasing was window dressing.
kody

Looking back at this election, I suspect the big loser (aside from Dion) will be the Media.

They told us a cartoon bird “overshadowed” all other issues (the word was Paul Wells’),

Three lines of a five year old speech was important, IMPORTANT (editorialization was applied liberally – excuse the pun – to “make the case” as to why it was a really big deal

A single line of black humor in a private meeting, dominated headlines

add in the dreaded squeeze of the daughter’s arm, and now the cowboy boots (and no it was obviously an attempt to link Harper to Bush, not a fifty dollar expense issue – let’s try and keep some honesty here),

and yet Harper will win, and likely will win big.

What’s remarkable is that with each successive “gotcha” moment the media tried to overplay, and which failed miserably, was met with another, even more frivolous yet headline grabbing story.

Any business, media included, that assumes that its customers are ignorant fools who can be manipulated as desired, will not long survive.

P.S. is it any wonder that one of the favorite lines in the debate highlighted by the press the next day, was the cheap shot, immature and completely irrelevant references to Harper’s sweater?
Sisyphus

I think what we’re talking about is accountability for words and actions and why it is such a rare commodity.
The honourable losers we admire in retrospect.
Stanfield, Clark, Broadbent, maybe Dion.
Do we see them as honourable because they were losers or as losers because they were honourable?
Harper is not honourable. Even his admirers seem to fear him a bit. Yet we let so much slide because apparently he’s clever and does whatever because he can do whatever.
Much the same applied to Chretien and Trudeau who we see as winners.
Apparently to be winner you have to be an asshole.
http://demosthenes.blogspot.com Demosthenes

I don’t think highlighting the bizarre lack of a conservative platform is a “cheap shot”. It was perfectly legitimate.

The rushed platform next week is also going to be a bit of an issue as well. They clearly weren’t expecting to have to produce it, and will likely create it in haste. Unfortunately they also know it will be closely scrutinized by a re-energized Liberal war room for bad policy, economic denialism, and signs of plagiarism.

That’s a lot of pressure for an embattled and depopulated “little house of Tories”, isn’t it?
http://demosthenes.blogspot.com Demosthenes

(sorry, that should be “little shop of Tories”. Kady certainly deserves to have her words copied as thoroughly as John Howard did!)
Mike G

If he takes none of the blame, can he receive any of the credit? That doesn’t seem possible. Or rational. So are we collectively making some sort of post-modern decision that political speeches no longer matter? And is that a really enlightened point of view? Or a sign of profound apathy?

I think, actually, this is more of an acknowledgement by the public of the fact that speechwriters write speeches. Whether or not the Owen Lippert story is true (and it’s pretty much going to be impossible for us to know, unless someone leaks an alternative story someday) … I think it’s very simple. We know that political events are managed affairs, scripted and plotted out.

The postmodern aspect might be the collective indifference to the knowledge that everything is managed and therefore, on some level, fake, but there is no reason that fake things shouldn’t matter. Great films and novels change people’s minds all the time. Western political oratory has been precision-engineered, by professionals of various pedigrees, for, what, 2500 years now?

At least now, instead of pretending to ourselves that Harper pens every speech all by himself, we realize there is a system behind it. They took a minor hit, Lippert took a major hit, and that, it seems to me, is how it should be.
Mike G

Oops. First paragraph should be italicized. Or deleted.
Two Cents

Gimme a break.

No senior minister should or, indeed, could write his or her speeches. They are too busy. That’s why they have speechwriters. Does anybody remember Ted Sorensen?
Terry86

I am surprised how big of a deal some people are making of this. Over in another blog, Warren Kinsella talks a lot about writing speeches for Chretien. I think its just something we accept from leaders nowadays. Writing the speech is only half of the task. And I believe that the primeminister probably chooses among several alternate speeches. Delivering it is the other half. If they do a good job on delivery why shouldn’t they take credit.
Critical Reasoning

Three lousy sentences? Really? That’s all the Liberals could come up with?

The Liberals were aware of the plagiarized passages in Harper’s Iraq speech for more than three months, and since then they undoubtedly deployed a small army of staffers and volunteers to comb through his past pronouncements, hunting for more “plagiarism”.
I assume that they approached this task methodically – by compiling a database of every word Harper has ever written or spoken in public, from various sources: the Parliamentary Record, internet searches, the LexisNexis news database, and many others. They then filtered Harper’s words through commercially available software tools – the same tools college professors use to scan student papers for plagiarism.

After exhaustively searching the millions of words that Harper has spoken in the past five years, the Liberals were only able to find three sentences that were not original? Mathematically speaking, wouldn’t this make Harper one of the LEAST likely political figures in history to plagiarize something? Doesn’t the Liberal analysis essentially confirm the Conservatives’ claim that Owen Lippert’s plagiarism was an isolated incident?

Given that it is actually quite common for politicians, and their speechwriters, to “borrow” catchy phrases and passages from other politicians without attribution (Obama and Biden have done this numerous times, for example) I wonder how many other politicians could stand up to the same kind of scrutiny and pass with flying colours, as Harper did?
But there’s more to come – I’m sure of it. The Liberals probably discovered Harris’s three sentences a long time ago and they waited until today to publish it, to achieve maximum effect by manipulating the media in order to build a narrative about “Harper’s plagiarism problem.”

The Liberals probably have a few more examples in their pocket, even weaker and more trivial than this one, that they will make public every day or so until the election. This is one of the most transparently dishonest and despicable smears ever attempted by a Canadian political party, and I’m not even sure if the media are willing to call them on it.
T. Thwim

Three sentences from Harris. About half the speech from Brown.
Anon

“About half the speech from Brown.”

Howard. Brown/UK is left-wing.
Jack Mitchell

It does matter and the fact that various Harper apologists can’t see that shows how far the Tories have taken the nation’s political culture towards nihilism.

When you hire somebody to write a speech for you, the idea is that you’re getting exclusive access to that speech. Most politicians review what they’re going to say very carefully for that reason. They often change things around themselves. They’re not usually robots. Why? Because it’s they who are delivering the speech! The words on the page are going to become their words by virtue of the act of utterance! So if somebody else has already said those words, they cannot credibly be taken as the politician’s own.

Whatever, henceforth we will know that Harper is merely grandstanding whenever he gives a speech and doesn’t mean a word of it as his own. I was drifting in that direction beforehand but now I know for sure. The man has the morals of a petty thief.
DR

The real question for me is, who wrote his famous Quebec speech from 2 years ago?

Dumont?
Bouchard?
Duplessis?
john g

kody, you nailed it man.

Don’t forget the attempt to smear Peter MacKay for the capital crime of buying lunch 2 years ago for his department staff that were working weekends.

Harper’s “secretive government”, muzzling of his people, and media management strategies over the last 3 years have been more than justified by the performance of the media over the last 3 weeks.
Jarrid

Liberal smears used to help them get elected. It’s wearing a little thin now.

Why is it that the Liberal dirt never actually relates to the Conservative government’s actual governance? Because there is none.

Why did Canadians continue to support Pierre Trudeau even though they knew that he was riding around on a motorcycle wearing Nazi insignia and supporting the Germans. Because it was old news and Canadians decided Aaron to, guess what,…move on.
Sean S.

Aaron,

This would actually make for a pretty cool book, based on the questions you pose. Not focussed on Harper exclusively, but looking at our cultural definition of authenticity. what it means to own an idea, and the whole tension between political leaders as people (their character, inviduality and ability to relate to “normal” folks) versus political leaders as superhumans (requiring knowledge and vision, serving as icons/symbols, grasping complex dynamics of policy and events, etc…).

Authenticity seems to rest at the core of this. Was Elvis less authentic becuase he performed “black” music for white audiences? Does it matter if Obama coined the phrase “change you can believe in”? Is it more important that Harper was taking talking points from other world leaders, or that he was in favour of sending troops to Iraq?

There was a good discussion on Paikin’s The Agenda last night, talking about “share a beer” politics – the idea that politicians need to be perceived as ultimately “average” jills/joes who would fit in just fine at the Legion Hall. I think this speaks to the notiion of a desire for authenticity on the part of voters – even though it’s largely an unrealistic fantasy in many ways (witness Harper’s claim to know what it’s like to be between jobs – even he seemed uncomfortable saying that).

It’s funny. Jack Layton scored big points on Thursday night for his one liners, and you can be sure those weren’t spontaneous creations, and that they were prepared by writers. (I wonder if Mulroney came up with the “You had an opotion” lne by himself?).

Sorry to prattle on for so long. I think you’re on to something here. Plagiarism isn’t the issue, precisely, but the idea of authenticity, political speeches as reflection of the leader, and the residual sin of sharing words with Howard/Bush are all fairly relevant to understanding how our society creates and empowers political leaders.
Lord Kitchener’s Own

So are we collectively making some sort of post-modern decision that political speeches no longer matter? And is that a really enlightened point of view? Or a sign of profound apathy?

I don’t think it’s enlightenment or apathy, I think it’s profound cynicism. We don’t particularly care if a politician’s words are his own, his speech writers, or the words of someone else that his speech writer stole, because we don’t particularly believe anything any politician says to us. We don’t particularly care if a party has a well thought out and detailed platform that they present to the people well in advance to evaluate, or if they throw something together in a back room seven days before the election because they can no longer stand up to the scrutiny of not having a plan at all. Why not? Because whatever’s in the plan, we don’t particularly expect our politicians to actually implement it.

Now, personally, I can’t wait to see the Tory platform (FINALLY) on Tuesday. I hope they release a five point list of priorities, so we can all ask if they plan to finish they’re first five before moving on to the new one’s (any one else satisfied with they’re shiny new health care wait times guarantees from the last go round? – didn’t think so).

We may not believe anything politicians say, and we may not believe the policy platforms they put before us, but how embarrassing must it be for a party to literally have to be SHAMED into presenting the Canadian people with a plan of what they plan to do if they’re elected. I mean, I suppose it’s novel (we’re not going to tell you what we plan to do in government in any detail, but heck, you wouldn’t believe us anyway). I mean, it’s almost refreshing. However, it’s also kinda like saying “look, I know you’re not sure if you want me to be in charge of your money, so why don’t you just sign this blank cheque?” (except of course that we all know it’ll be the other way around, as the Tories spend the last week of the campaign using announcements from their new platform to try to bribe us with our own money, while doing their best to ignore the current economic crisis, and pretend it has no effect on us… I mean, who knew there was actually a REASON to keep a large surplus around just in case! – Oh, right. The Liberals).
http://carnewsandviews.com jwl

Sean S

I was thinking of last night’s Agenda as well. I liked the section when Richard Gwyn and Theo Caldwell discussed how much of a bubble our pols live in now, and how many assistants they have, compared to 100 hundred years ago when you could basically walk up to the PM on the street and give him an earful, if that’s what you desired.