It shouldn’t be necessary to say this since it has absolutely nothing to do with who should be elected governor in November, but all major candidates hire national political consultants to work on their campaigns and some of those consultants are lazy.
But since dishonest attacks on a candidate can make a difference in a close election, someone should point out the latest Republican attacks on Democrat Mary Burke as a plagiarist and a thief are not only completely untrue, but totally absurd.
It’s reminiscent of the old joke about a candidate who won an election by accusing his opponent of being a thespian.
Calling your opponent a plagiarist sounds faintly criminal, especially to those who don’t have any idea what plagiarism really is or that Burke has never engaged in it.
Let’s try to explain as clearly as possible what this totally inconsequential, completely contrived “controversy” is all about.
Just like Republican Gov. Scott Walker, Burke has hired national political consultants to work on what has been a very successful campaign that has the race razor close a little more than a month before Election Day.
Such professional hired guns move from campaign to campaign around the country election after election. Candidates use these consultants to help draft their platforms and proposals during their campaigns.
Among others, a long-time Philadelphia-based political consultant Eric Schnurer contributed to the development of Burke’s 49-page jobs plan she’s highlighted in her campaign against Walker, a governor with one of the worst job creation records in the country.
But here’s what else campaigns get when they hire outside political consultants. Those consultants have an opportunity to simply cut and paste work they’ve done in the past. Apparently, that’s what Schnurer did.
Republicans, looking for any possible way to trash Burke, leaked a story to a political website that parts of her jobs plan were “plagiarized” from the economic plans of previous Democratic gubernatorial campaigns in Indiana, Tennessee and Delaware.
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There was no plagiarism. You can’t plagiarize yourself. Schnurer was simply recycling work and repeating language he’d used in those other campaigns.
Reporters, of all people, shouldn’t go around misusing the word plagiarism. It’s even worse when they repeat other dishonest Republican verbs to claim Burke was swiping, pilfering or copying somebody else’s work.
Burke’s campaign paid for the work. What they got was a lazy, recycled, cut-and-paste job. That’s why Schnurer was fired when the story came out.
Burke’s Plan Is Better Than Walker’s Failure
But the only real questions for Burke herself are whether the ideas she supports in her jobs plan are good ideas and whether they would be more successful than the failed ideas of the Walker administration.
It would be difficult for any governor to do any worse. Walker won election in 2010 promising to create 250,000 jobs in his first term and explicitly telling voters they should hold him to that promise. Four years later, he’s failed miserably, creating barely more than 100,000 jobs.
Even if Democratic campaigns around the country weren’t using the same consultants, some of whom just mail it in, it’s certainly no surprise Democratic campaigns contain similar economic proposals.
Democrats and Republicans have very different approaches to creating jobs. Namely, Democrats believe in creating jobs. Republicans don’t. Democrats believe jobs are created from the bottom up when a healthy middle class has money to spend. Republicans believe jobs are created from the top down by the wealthy.
That’s why when President Barack Obama was elected in 2008 to pull the country out of the Republican Great Recession, the second worst economic disaster in U.S. history, he proposed multibillion-dollar jobs programs to provide jobs for working people all over the country, just as President Franklin Delano Roosevelt did in the 1930s to successfully recover from the Great Depression.
And that’s why Republicans fought Obama every step of the way, voting against job creation and economic recovery in favor of maintaining large tax cuts for the wealthiest people in America.
One of the ironies about Walker’s re-election difficulties is that when he promised 250,000 jobs in his first term, he was counting on Obama’s economic recovery plan to make it come true even as he attacked the president.
But it was right-wing Republicans just like himself in Congress who kept throwing monkey wrenches into the recovery by voting against job creation. Republicans unpatriotically wanted to slow America’s economic recovery under Obama in hopes of preventing his re-election.
Walker then made the job picture even worse in Wisconsin by destroying bargaining rights for public employees and wiping out nearly $3 billion in jobs, wages and consumer spending all over the state.
It does matter where candidates get their economic ideas. The citizens of Wisconsin would be much better off today if Walker had plagiarized a few effective job creation ideas from knowledgeable economists instead of taking all of his ideas from right-wing tea party websites.
