If you apply his own standards, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker seems to have plagiarized his passive-aggressive talking points on alleged plagiarism by his opponent, Democratic candidate Mary Burke.
Wisconsin news media – in particularly the state's largest daily paper, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel – have been devoting considerable space in recent days to charges that, according to a tweet from the Journal Sentinel reporter who wrote the original story, were leaked to the paper by Walker himself. In short order, Wisconsin's opinion leader took up Walker's off-camera insinuation that Burke's lengthy, detailed, and foot-noted economic-development policy paper was in part “plagiarized.”
Cue gasps, shocked expressions and GOP calls for Burke to retire from the race. Walker himself, as is his habit, has been much more taciturn, playing the aw, shucks, if she doesn't come clean that's bad for her angle, as if he hadn't started up this entire, mostly mindless, over-hyped distraction in the first place. He's holding the gasoline can and match behind his back and wonders aloud in thoughtful tones how this all might affect Burke's campaign. But if there's a perpetrator in this little tragicomic play, it's Walker.
The situation reminds me of that joke about the bandit caught red-handed. About to be arrested, he gestures wildly to a point behind the advancing cops and yells, “Look! It's Elvis!” Distract and flee. It's a good strategy, if you've got nothing else left in your bag of tricks.
What, in the midst of this huge but not at all unprecedented distraction, about the real issues? What about Walker's own record? What of Walker's own legal troubles in two John Doe investigations that already have resulted in several convictions among his former aides and have pointed at questionable activity involving him, personally? Who's lighting the match on that conflagration?
What of the new, second Wisconsin state audit showing big fiscal and management problems at the crony-capitalist, quasi-private, economic development agency Walker created and runs as chairman, an agency he stuffed with his political appointees and which, on paper, favors businesses in regions of the state where he got more votes and the businesses gave him more donations?
What of those consistently putrid job-creation figures on Walker's watch, wherein Wisconsin wallows in the bottom fourth of all states and dead last among fellow Midwestern neighbors? What of Walker's environmental-deregulation impetus, enabling dangerous frack-sand mining and maybe enabling a super-gigantic, open-pit iron ore mine near a state forest and a tribal reservation?
What of the nonpartisan Wisconsin Legislative Fiscal Bureau's projection of a $1.8 billion or larger deficit in the state budget despite Walker's proclamations of a fat surplus just months ago?
Never mind all that. Look over there! It's...it's Elvis!
From here, the Walker record pretty much looks like a train wreck -- a metaphor courtesy of a governor who turned down nearly a billion dollars in federal grants to build high-speed rail across the state.
Nevertheless, the really big issue of the moment in this campaign is now: plagiarism! Or, rather it's not a real issue, just the biggest.
Because, as it turns out, if you read on through and past the headlines and well into the jump, the particulars of this “scandal” are far more nuanced and tame than allegations of literary theft. To wit:
Burke's campaign hired a political consultant who crafted the contested position paper. In it the consultant, since fired, lifted several isolated passages from policy papers he'd earlier crafted for other Democrats from other states. In another words, the consultant borrowed from himself. Which at worst makes Burke the victim, not the perpetrator. As for the consultant himself: You can't plagiarize your own work.
Nevertheless, this little dust devil of a political issue is now the main subject of discussion in a very tight November election campaign. Which is, no doubt, exactly what Walker intended and hoped. It's not the first such diversion in the campaign. A couple of weeks ago the big news was that the Burke campaign had decided to keep a donation from a repeat drunken driver who was a state tax delinquent. Odds are better than even that the Walker-controlled Wisconsin Department of Revenue fingered the contributor's tax records for the boss, sort of like how Richard Nixon used to try to sic the IRS on his opponents.
The governor clearly believes in a double standard, and he doesn't take seriously the traditional purposes and methods of political parties like his own Republican Party or the Democratic Party. How do we know this? For one thing, political parties routinely issue umbrella platforms on their public policy preferences. Individual candidates from those parties often issue their own policy papers, which can be entirely individualized or composed entirely of the party's umbrella platform, or – often – an amalgam of both. But this Wisconsin incident also shines a light on other troubling developments in how people perceive political campaigns and how they are run. And while there's plenty of grist for everyone's mill, this all starts with the decay of the Republican Party.
For the big picture, click past the little puff of backroom cigar smoke, below.
Historically, political parties existed -- as did third-party special interest groups -- to implement political policy preferences in a more efficient way (not unlike the reason why labor unions were invented). To do this the party regulars would disseminate their ideas and build support for them. Indeed, the very definition of a political party suggests that a candidate can't "plagiarize" policy ideas from his or her own organized fellows: "A political party," says Wikipedia, "is an organization of people which seeks to achieve goals common to its members through the acquisition and exercise of political power." [boldfacing mine]
Until very recently, these public policy ideas were freely shared around, quoted, and re-appropriated. Good ideas have a habit of proliferating that way. Seldom were these political tracts copyrighted or signed by any particular author. They were and are frequently written by teams of people, and seldom by the candidates themselves. Even today, from one election to another, the best campaign material is re-edited and rewritten. Oh, and also, that material is widely shared around.
These days politicians seem most interested in campaign tactics of winning campaigns. But really good candidates are also interested in good public policy ideas, whether they come from their own party, and whether they were produced by winning candidates. And that's the idea behind dissemination, in the first place: Get our views out there. Get people to pay attention. Get a discussion going. Make our democracy more inclusive and keep it moving forward.
But few voters or even opinion leaders including the news media do pay attention to the details. In our sound-bite and sound-byte era, the details don't matter nearly so much as the rhetoric and the “story of the day” and the “message,” which are often hugely simplified. That may be why Scott Walker won election to the governorship despite having a weak, very short policy paper describing his own jobs plan, one that in scope and sweep easily was trounced by his failed opponent, Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett.
Walker's policy amounted to: We'll create jobs. He offered up as his goal a magic number that would indicate the success of his vague approach, one that wasn't so big but sounded big. He isn't even halfway to achieving that goal as his term nears its end.
And thus we have serious policy papers (the ones so detailed that few people take time to read them) and we have circus acts, like Walker's own economic development paper, which was so short that Walker's campaign comically decided to publish it in a huge type font so, compared to Barrett's paper, it had more heft --- well, to be precise, the actual proposals still had far less heft, but the reams of paper the policy was wastefully printed on were thicker and weighed more.
Walker's approach was partly intentional. Politicians like him constantly call for "transparency" and more clearly defined ideas. But to them “clearly” often means “crudely simplified so a low-information voter can understand what we're very loosely outlining.”
A Tom Barrett-style Democrat might say that in order to move Wisconsin forward, heavy lifting is required, and so we should load metaphorical semi-trailers full of new economic-development and education programs. A Walker-style Republican would say that what Wisconsin really needs is a tricked-out Harley Davidson motorcycle, ideally driven by Walker himself (the man does ride a Harley, sometimes on the public's dime), because everyone will turn around and look when that big ol' hog comes roaring into town. Of course, there will be next to nothing in the way of useful programs packed into the bike's tiny seat pouch, but who cares? It's going to look way cool!
Meanwhile, how Republicans would actually achieve their goals is, more and more, kept deliberately obtuse, because it is, these days, slash-and-burn legislating. Besides, the more precisely you describe a plan to achieve your policy aims, the more likely it is someone will find something in that plan they don't like, or can argue about. This is true in the case of Walker, who from the beginning of his political career decades ago has been positively Nixonian about not revealing his true aims or tactics, beyond sheer rhetoric.
Richard Nixon, you may recall, wouldn't commit in his 1968 presidential run to any specific set of plans to end the war in Vietnam. He had what he called a "secret" plan. The secret turned out to be that he planned to muddle through. The war survived his failed presidency, growing larger, not smaller. In that '68 campaign, Nixon's claim of a secret solution let him focus on attacking Hubert Humphrey's more detailed and nuanced ideas about the war. It was like holding a crappy hand in poker and bluffing your way through without drawing any cards. Works, sometimes.
Walker, to take the most egregious example from his own tenure, was known by a small plurality of the electorate to be anti-union when he ran for governor. He'd had dust-ups with the Milwaukee County public employee unions as county executive. But only after the secret John Doe emails come out did Wisconsin residents learn that he had, years before taking the governor's seat, sketched out a number of steps in a draft campaign to gut the power of public employee unions, and only after his election to the governorship did he, in his own words, "drop the bomb" and usher in the union-busting Act 10 law.
He must have respected the popularity and power of labor unions in the state, because he told the electorate the law was only necessary to help him cope with a projected deficit. Doing away with collective bargaining would help him balance the budget. Which was code for heavily trimming worker salaries and benefits and making the public workplace a top-down hierarchy with less room for employee voices. But he didn't deem the budget “crisis” bad enough to apply this tough love to police and other labor unions that supported him. Situational ethics work for Republicans, if you can keep voters from noticing them.
It's a lot easier to maneuver and evade accountability when you mealy-mouth your way through a campaign, pledging, like Walker did, to create 250,000 new private-sector jobs by the end of your first term, without saying much of anything about how. In the current campaign, Walker has evaded accountability for that pledge, proudly pointing to much smaller job-growth figures as proof he's on the right track.
Mostly, Walker has focused like a laser beam not on creating jobs or his own middling rhetoric, but the elaborate and detailed job-creation positions staked out by Democratic opponent Mary Burke. Apparently, he couldn't really find anything to fault in the actual substance of those proposals, at least none that he is willing to call out in public. So he focuses on the sizzle, rather than the steak -- and he creates his own sizzle, leaking to Milwaukee Journal Sentinel columnist Dan Bice the evident results of his campaign's leave-no-dust-mote-unanalyzed exploration of Burke's policy papers.
Where did Walker get the idea to make the structure of (but not the ideas within) Burke's policy papers a campaign issue? Well, arguably, he plagiarized it.
A number of mostly Republican candidates for public office in other states have in recent years been embarrassed by revelations of documents in their campaigns or earlier in their careers that turned out to have been heavily borrowed from other sources without attribution. The most celebrated recent case was in Oregon, where the economic plan of Republican Senate candidate Monica Wehby looked to have been heavily copied from multiple sources, including one section that was word-for-word identical to a plan released by GOP Oregon Sen. Rob Portman a month earlier. Poor Wehby was savaged in the national media. Her policy views? Didn't matter in the face of the “theft” of some other politician's position-paper lingo.
It's quite possible, by the way, that Wehby was set up by reactionary forces within her own party. She was, by national standards, a more moderate Republican candidate than most we lately have seen that tea-infused party trotting out.
On the Democratic side, U.S. Sen. John Walsh of Montana opted out of his re-election campaign earlier this year when it was reported he may have plagiarized for a paper he presented while attending the U.S. Army War College seven years earlier. That accusation seemed to have more meat on its bones, because the quality of the paper figured into Walsh's graduation. It wasn't just about talking policy.
In any event, when the Buzzfeed political blog broke its story on the Wehby case, a story it reported in excruciating detail like some kind of investigatory expose, it used the verb "plagiarize" to characterize the Wehby campaign's verbatim use of language from other campaigns. That's a reach, because, for one thing, like-minded politicians from whom the language was lifted didn't seem overly if at all upset by that re-use (see "definition of a political party," above). But, moreover, as we've noted, in servicing their own agenda, traditional political parties actively seek to have their ideas shared, and so do many of the individual campaigners within those parties.
Of course, the GOP is no longer a traditional political party; Republicans now often eat their elders and their young, alike.
After the over-hyped Wehby incident, the political plagiarism idea quickly morphed into a meme: If you don't come up with entirely original material, or don't take pains to footnote every line you re-purpose, even if it's from within your own political party, you're somehow morally defective, or at least in position to be accused of that. Before long, voters were reading more and more dispatches from more and more news outlets about the supposedly scandalous if commonplace practice of turning out campaign positions papers that relied on party or political think-tank boilerplate.
How did that happen so fast? The Wehby tale was delicious reading, and profit-minded Internet sites can't get enough of delicious. So they hyped it for their own purposes. But two other factors intervened:
First, professional news media have a very big red button that they punch in negative reaction to any re-use by anyone of someone else's material. Many journalists have been punished by their own organizations for deliberately or inadvertently reusing verbatim material from other news sources without attribution. That's an ethical standard that in journalism is wise and good, but the same news organizations don't seem to have a fine appreciation for the difference between their own standard and other standards that might reasonably apply elsewhere.
Moreover, news operations seem at times to have misconstrued and conflated the meaning of plagiarism, a very powerful pejorative. The Buzzfeed story on Wehby is an example, To the credit of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, it's coverage has reported not just Walker's spin on the "plagiarism," but also the Burke side's contrary argument. Nevertheless, it's the negative headlines and day-after-day squawk-boxing from the right that end up making this the bear trap that Team Walker no doubt hoped it would be.
Second, over in the Republican Party, where the business of America is business, and so is the party itself and it's none of your business, the apparatchik have on occasion in recent election cycles taken to applying copyrights to various party documents, even entire campaign web sites, among them U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wisconsin). Yes, that's apparently inconsistent with the purpose of campaigning: If you make it harder for others to reproduce your messaging, you thwart the free dispersal of that information that parties once depended upon.
But if you're increasingly an authoritarian party less into actual policy development and more into controlling and limiting the carefully manipulated messages you thrive upon, then curtailing access to your own information is now considered a good thing, right down to -- as has happened in the Walker campaign -- re-tooling your web site on the fly, taking down suddenly double-plus-ungood references and pretending they never existed.
Fuzzing up and/or discrediting the messages of outsiders is corollary to this new custom. Which is why candidates like Walker are stretching to redirect the glare of public scrutiny away from their oftentimes awful ideology and ultimately illogical or incomprehensible positions, as in the case of a national health-care reform law they largely crafted.
That's why, in Republicanland, when some now forgotten wagging tongue (I'm thinking it might have been Karl Rove) decided it would be worthwhile to marginalize the Democratic Party by deliberately and inaccurately referring in all cases to the "Democrat Party," the term spread quickly. No one claimed that this widely shared phrasing by disparate interests within conservatism should be foot-noted or viewed as some kind of plagiarism. It became instead a meme. And there are many examples of this. "Death panels" is another.
Indeed, political satirists like Jon Stewart on "The Daily Show" have made much fun of how large groups of conservative talking heads from disparate TV networks or interest groups somehow manage to come up with the exact same talking points, day after day. Republicans know that centralized messaging is more powerful because it is focused and consistent. So attacking your opponents in ways that decentralize their own messaging is a plus for the GOP. Included in this like-minded group are right-wing radio talk show hosts, who for many years now have received a "blast fax" (it's probably now a blast email) from the Republican National Committee laying out the unified talking point of each new day.
To put it in other figurative terms, if eight Democrats say “howl” and two say “bark,” one of the latter may well get blamed for stealing the usage.
There are exceptions to this. Walker does steer his own course, above and beyond his own state party apparatus, and the tea-party ideologue generally soft-pedals the tea party line while trying very hard to implement it. He can afford to do this as necessary because his campaign like many conservative interests groups is very flush financially. [The Wisconsin-based MacIver Institute is so flush it is busy buying up spot ads here at DailyKos expecting to help win Wisconsin voters by proclaiming, “Scott Walker Proposes $827 Million In New Tax Cuts!”]
Walker has – along with outside money and legally “uncoordinated help” that the John Doe probe suggests he himself helped direct -- spent record millions of dollars running for governor, and has millions more in his war chest. So he can if he likes hire armies of proofreaders to ferret out errors or omissions in lengthy, sometimes hastily composed documents from less-well-heeled opponents.
Like many conservatives, Walker apparently also is prone to projection: If we do it, then the other side must be doing it, only more so. He has faced a major political scandal and thus Burke must likewise have done something equally wrong, or worse. Thus comes the assault on Burke's alleged lack of leadership or ethics, because, the reasoning goes, either she personally approved the consultant's borrowed lingo or she didn't personally write or copy-edit every detail of her campaign. Yet Walker's the guy who claims the Doe investigations are over and that he didn't know there was an illegal, secret campaign operation happening 20 feet from his desk in the office of the Milwaukee county executive. The secret White House tapes had nothing on the secret John Doe emails implicating his own lack of candor.
So, to sum up: Walker leaked word (without the contextual detail supplied by the press and yours truly) that a veteran political consultant hired by the Burke campaign borrowed from his own writing for previous Democratic candidates, replicating a handful of paragraphs for Burke's lengthy policy paper. That paper clearly integrates an intriguing mix of ideas from many sources, along with many a footnote. It's the kind of policy paper that serious students of political science might expect of a thoughtful candidate. However, because the policy paper didn't make clear that the consultant who wrote it borrowed (you can't really plagiarize from yourself) language from his own, earlier work for other like-minded Democrats and institutions, it's Burke – not Walker – who has an alleged and overriding "transparency" problem. Crafty political ju jitsu, if it works.
Actually, the only thing that's truly transparent in this affair is Walker's own craven drive to win, at all costs, and with as little substantive exploration of public policy issues as possible – especially those that invite public scrutiny of his own record. Walker's due to pay all this forward, and that duck-billed platypus up at the top might tell him to put it on his bill.
5:13 PM PT: Capper at Wisconsin's Cognitive Dissonance web blog has a swell post tonight listing some of the many instances where Scott Walker's campaign arguably ripped off the work of others, without attribution. See:
http://cognidissidence.blogspot.com/...