Milli Vanilli for President?

Why isn't speechwriting considered plagiarism?

It's a provocative question, asked by David McGrath, who teaches English at the University of South Alabama, in an op-ed in the Washington Post on Sept. 4. (Since the Post requires you to sign up for an account to read the piece, though, I'll tell you all about it.)

McGrath comes at the question from an interesting perspective because his first post-college job in 1972 was writing commissioned papers for a term-paper mill. After he'd been doing it for a few months, though, the company was shut down, its existence declared illegal because it violated "an implicit educational contract" between teaching institutions and their students.

Yet politicians use speechwriters all the time to put words in their mouths and present those words as their own. McGrath writes:

The fact that the writers give permission to the speakers to pretend it's their own work does not make it okay. That's exactly what happens with term-paper mills. Just ask Jacksonville State University President William Meehan, who in 2007 was publicly embarrassed and officially denounced after it was discovered that his weekly column in a local paper had routinely been ghostwritten by the college's publicist.

It's also not like screen writing or playwriting. Everyone knows the actors don't write their own material, plus the writers are credited. Not something I've ever sees after a politician finishes speaking.

Some of us are aware that speechwriters are used by politicians, but none of us knows to what extent by any given politician for any given speech. And this seems like an important level of knowledge to have, albeit one I have never wished I had before, since I am so accustomed to the way things are. As McGrath says:

All those years ago, Harvard's lawyer referred to the implicit understanding between teachers and students. Isn't it even more important that there be a contract of honesty between candidates for high office and voters?

When Richard Nixon used to recite the essays of his speechwriter William Safire, you ended up knowing quite a bit about Safire and little or nothing about Nixon. Think how much more we might have known, and how history might even have been different, had Nixon spoken his mind from the start.

Sarah Palin's speech on Wednesday night of the Republican National Convention, McGrath says, was written by Matthew Scully a week before "for an unknown male nominee," then tailored by Palin and a team of McCain staffers (while sequestered in the Minneapolis Hilton, as I remember reading last week). So just how much could we have learned about her from the speech? As McGrath says,

Psychologists, composition teachers, college admissions officers and personnel directors all know that when it comes to extracting truth and character, there is no more reliable indicator than a person's original, written words. Why, then, as we watch two finalists compete for the most important job in the world, do we tolerate their lip-syncing of someone else's creation?

(I love that lip-syncing analogy.)

McGrath concludes by calling on candidates to credit their writers, unless they actually write the speech completely. We all know this will never happen. But it's nice to imagine a system where we actually get to hear what the candidate has to say instead of a bunch of English and political science majors who are paid to put words in her/his mouth.