Here's a quiz. Which of these things is not like the others?
A. A few years ago, we added a concrete parking slab and a retaining wall next to our garage. We got a few quotes first, and every concrete guy who came to the house brought a book of photos and testimonials. We got to flip though the book, and when we saw a retaining wall style we liked, we said, "We like that one. Do that for us, please."
B. This year, I'm teaching 10th grade English. I haven't taught that class in the better part of a decade and not at all at the school where I teach now. But Shakespeare's "Julius Caesar" is on the calendar now just as it was the last time I taught it. When the other teachers and I were planning this semester's final exam last week, I dug up the questions I wrote about that play for a final exam I gave years ago at my previous school. We're going to put some of those questions on the final this year.
C. In the 1990s, the economy of Japan was awful. They call it Japan's "lost decade." The country's response was a policy of austerity, pulling back on government spending in the hopes that the private sector would step into the breach and get the Japanese economy back on a solid footing. When the economy of Europe collapsed in the 2000s, places like Greece and Italy – following Japan's lead – also pursued austerity, attempting a specific and common policy solution to a common problem (FYI, austerity didn't work. Japan's economy is booming right now because of a strong stimulus, while Greece is simply hoping that maybe, just maybe, they'll finish the year with barely positive growth for the first time in years).
D. When we got married, my wife and I hired a band we really loved to play the reception. They put on a hell of a show, playing a lot of our favorite songs of theirs, in fact. And we were very glad that they played all the right notes and sang all the right words in the right order. That's why we hired them!
E. Did I mention I'm a teacher? My class syllabus clearly says, "If you can Google it, I can Google it." Yet every year I have multiple uncomfortable conversations with students who insist that the site I show them online must have copied from them, not the other way around.
So what was your answer? Did you pick E? You should have. Answer choice E is the only one that describes an actual instance of plagiarism, something that, as a teacher – and an English teacher at that! – I have very strong feelings about.
The other answer choices are not plagiarism, or even close to it.
By now, you have probably figured out what party I am coming to, even though I am very late to it (real life got in the way of my writing a column last week when this might have been more relevant). And that party is the Mary Burke plagiarism "scandal."
A think-tank consultant Burke hired used, in places word-for-word, parts of a jobs plan that he had also used for three other Democratic candidates for governor in other states. This caused Republicans and the Wisconsin press to hit their fainting couches harder than Datone Jones sacked Jay Cutler this past Sunday.
When the "scandal" broke, I joked on Twitter: "Dem gov candidate has jobs plan favored by Dem gov candidates nationwide and @DanielBice is ON IT." It boggled my mind that anyone, let alone the state's top political watchdog reporter, should find this scandalous. Yet he did, as did many others. Some actual elected Republicans called for Burke to drop out of the race.
To be fair, I followed up that joke tweet almost immediately with an expression of disappointment that no one in Burke's campaign had given the jobs plan a once-over to make sure it matched Burke's style. No one, for example, doubted that Gov. Scott Walker's Wiffle Ball of a jobs plan matched his style perfectly. But that's a technicality; no one seriously expects a candidate, at least not one for an office like governor, to personally pen every piece of literature or every page of policy proposal put out under her name. It just can't happen. I mean, that's why campaign staffs exist in the first place.
But nothing else about this situation sets off my finely-honed plagiarism detector. Indeed, I crafted all the other answer choices in that quiz above – all true stories! – to cover every aspect of this situation.
Burke or her people had a chance to examine the options out there and the think-tank guy they hired must have made the right presentation, had the right picture of a nice retaining wall to stretch out the analogy, to get hired. He went back and used his own work product to fill a need, the same way I recycle exam questions.
The parts copied, about entrepreneurship and job training and public-private partnerships, are popular solutions to the common problem of job growth. And when the plan was done – like when the Common Faces (there's a flashback, Wisconsin!) played my wedding – the Burke campaign was surely happy to find that the plan they bought was presented in the way they wanted it to be. It was, in fact, personalized for Wisconsin, even in the passages flagged as plagiarism; it's not like Burke put out a plan promoting entrepreneurship in Delaware.
It is not any different, as others have pointed out before me, than state legislators like former Rep. Scott Walker using model legislation from sympathetic organizations to craft bills they pass. Truth-in-sentencing, Walker's signature bill from his legislative career was hardly an original idea.
So is this "scandal" evidence that Mary Burke is unqualified to be governor of Wisconsin? Hardly. It seems much more like evidence that the opposition has nothing of actual substance to campaign on. It is evidence, instead, of Republican desperation.
