If it's bad to use someone else's words without crediting them, what about taking credit for someone else's policies without crediting them?
That goes on a lot in politics, and goes both ways -- just last week, the Clinton campaign claimed that Obama stole pieces of his new plan to revive the economy from Clinton. But one of the most glaring examples of the practice involves Clinton's claim -- dating all the way back to her 2000 NY campaign for the Senate -- that she "championed" the Children's Health Insurance Program (known as "S-Chip") and deserves credit for getting health insurance for 6 miilion kids.
The claim has been repeated again and again in ads. But the claim has always been problematic, because Clinton was not in the Senate when the program was established. She was First Lady. In response, her campaign has always said she championed it inside the White House by getting her husband to sign it. And who's going to contradict her?
Well, no one -- until Ted Kennedy decided to endorse Obama. Kennedy is the actual champion of the program, in the sense of having sponsored it and having gotten it passed in the Senate. And this weekend, at a news briefing at which he asserted that Hillary was distorting Obama's health plan, Kennedy also brought up the Children's Health Insurance Program.
From First Read: "Kennedy also introduced a new line of attack on Clinton, saying that neither she nor her husband were initially for the S-Chip program which he introduced in the Senate with Republican Orrin Hatch after the failure of Clinton's health care plan in 1994."
Is borrowing accomplishments somehow more legitimate than borrowing words?