Melania, Plagiarism, and the Twelve-Bar Blues

Every time Eric Clapton plays a twelve-bar blues song, you could call it plagiarism.

After all, Robert Johnson and others played the blues first in the South way back in the 1920s and 1930s. But that misses the point. There are only so many ways to play a twelve-bar blues tune, just like there are only so many words a candidate’s wife, who has focused her attentions on raising her family rather than being in public life, can say in a speech at a national political convention that she loves America.

Rather than focus on the similarity of the sentiments expressed by Melania and Michelle, the natural question to ask is who sounds more authentic.

Context matters. When Churchill said, “Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few,” he was plagiarizing Shakespeare’s “Henry V” and giving old words new meaning, greater than what they contained before.

If Melania Trump expresses sentiments strikingly similar to Michelle Obama’s, the natural question to ask is who sounds more authentic, more genuine? Many guitarists can play the blues — but few can interpret the music the way Clapton can. Many politicians can quote Shakespeare, but few can use it to inspire their countrymen as Churchill could. And many wives of presidential candidates can profess their love of country in the same words emphasizing family — the duty to honor our forebears and the duty to pass freedoms to future generations.

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When they utter similar phrases, who sounds more authentic — Michelle or Melania? Did Michelle’s subsequent actions and statements as first lady give the nation any reason to believe that the sentiments she expressed were sincere? And do we have any reason to doubt that Melania’s expressions of those same sentiments are not heartfelt, and that by her actions as first lady she would be faithful to them?

In the aftermath of SpeechGate, Democrats and their supporters have revealed the depths to which they will descend in order to attack Trump. Not being able to attack Trump directly, since he didn’t speak Monday night, liberals have instead decided to attack Melania for plagiarism.

Not only is the charge of plagiarism tenuous at best, but those who wish to see Hillary Clinton in the White House would do well not to bring up issues like honesty in attacking the Trump campaign. And the pathetic attempt to hurl weak charges of plagiarism at Melania Trump is particularly bizarre given the Democrats’ own history of plagiarism.

In February 2008, President Obama gave a speech in Wisconsin that many argued was stolen from a speech given by Deval Patrick.

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Joe Biden, meanwhile, plagiarized an entire speech originally given by British politician Neil Kinnock. “Why I am the first Kinnock in a thousand generations to be able to get to university?” Kinnock asked. “Was it because our predecessors were thick? … Was it because they were weak, those people who could work eight hours underground and then come up and play football, weak? … It was because there was no platform upon which they could stand,” he continued.

“Why is it that Joe Biden is the first in his family ever to go to a university?” Biden later asked. “Is it because our fathers and mothers were not bright? .. Is it because they didn’t work hard, my ancestors who worked in the coal mines of Northeast Pennsylvania and would come up after 12 hours and play football for four hours? … It’s because they didn’t have a platform upon which to stand.”

Biden has a history of plagiarism — indeed, he was forced to withdraw from the 1988 race for just that reason. Not only have Obama and Biden had their own brushes with accusations of plagiarism, but what is arguably the most famous speech ever to pass a Democrat’s lips was also an apparent product of plagiarism.

“Ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country,” John F. Kennedy famously told the nation. Indeed, his words will likely live on well past the point where most people have forgotten who spoke them. The only problem is, they weren’t his. George St. John, Kennedy’s old headmaster at the Choate School in Connecticut, habitually asked his students such a question.

“I boil every time I read or hear the ‘Ask not… etc.’ phrase as being original Kennedy,” a former classmate said. “Time and time again we all heard [St. John] say that to the whole Choate family.”

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Finally, Michelle Obama herself was accused of plagiarism after the giving the speech which Melania Trump allegedly plagiarized Monday night. Saul Alinsky, the radical community organizer with a clear influence on the Obamas, wrote that “the standards of judgment must be rooted in the whys and wherefores of life as it is lived, the world as it is, not our wished-for fantasy of the world as it should be.”

Michelle Obama told the assembled crowd that “Barack stood up that day, and he spoke words that have stayed with me ever since. He talked about ‘the world as it is’ and ‘the world as it should be.'”

Rather than focus on the similarity of the sentiments Melania and Michelle expressed, the natural question to ask is who sounds more authentic, more genuine. Michelle Obama spoke of the values of honesty, hard work, and personal responsibility — values entirely absent from her husband’s administration.