For Biden, the accusations ultimately helped sink his campaign.īiden said this during a speech at the Iowa State Fair that year, which he reportedly said he had thought of "spontaneously" on the way there: ''I started thinking as I was coming over here, why is it that Joe Biden is the first in his family ever to go to a university? Why is it that my wife who is sitting out there in the audience is the first in her family to ever go to college? Is it because our fathers and mothers were not bright? Is it because I'm the first Biden in a thousand generations to get a college and a graduate degree that I was smarter than the rest?''Īnd here's what Kinnock said: ''Why am I the first Kinnock in a thousand generations to be able to get to university?'' Then pointing to his wife in the audience, he continued: ''Why is Glenys the first woman in her family in a thousand generations to be able to get to university? Was it because all our predecessors were thick?''Ĭampaign journalists Jack Germond and Jules Witcover quoted Biden later, saying, "All I had to say was 'Like Kinnock.' If I'd just said those two words, 'Like Kinnock,' and I didn't. The vice president, too, was in the midst of a presidential campaign when New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd pointed out strong similarities between a 1987 speech of Biden's and one by U.K. "I would add I've noticed on occasion Sen. Obama admitted the mistake and said he should have cited Patrick specifically, but that he didn't "really think this is too big of a deal." "Deval and I do trade ideas all the time, and you know he's occasionally used lines of mine," he said. Obama had "lifted rhetoric" from Patrick, with Clinton herself later saying: "If your whole candidacy is about words, then they should be your own words."
'I have a dream'-just words," he said.Īt the time, Clinton spokesman Howard Wolfson said Mr. 'Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country'-just words.
'We have nothing to fear but fear itself'-just words. Obama said in that speech.īack in 2006, Patrick's phrasing was similar: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal'-just words. 'We have nothing to fear but fear itself.' Just words, just speeches," Mr. 'We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.' Just words. Trump told me that people make innocent mistakes and that we learn and grow from these experiences."Don't tell me words don't matter! 'I have a dream.' Just words.
"That was my mistake," McIver said, "and I feel terrible for the chaos I have caused Melania and the Trumps, as well as to Mrs. McIver said she took notes and later included some of the phrasing in the final draft.īut McIver said she did not check Michelle Obama's 2008 speech at the Democratic National Convention ahead of the first of her husband's two successful presidential campaigns. McIver said that as she set out to write Melania Trump's speech, the would-be first lady read her some passages from Michelle Obama's speech to her over the phone. But she said the presidential contender rejected her offer. presidency.įor two days, the Trump campaign belittled complaints that Melania Trump had plagiarized portions of Michelle Obama's address in her Monday night speech to the Republican National Convention about her husband of 11 years.īut on Wednesday, Trump aide Meredith McIver, a one-time ballet dancer who helped write some of his books, said she offered to resign over the controversy that has consumed some of the news coverage of this week's convention in Cleveland, Ohio. An aide to Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump says she made a mistake in writing his wife Melania's tribute to him this week by including identical phrases from a speech Michelle Obama gave supporting her husband Barack Obama's 2008 run for the U.S.