Melania and Michelle

As I write this, on Tuesday, there is a little chatter in the press about the similarities in certain content between the speech given by Melania Trump, the Slovenian-born wife of Republican candidate Donald Trump, and one given in similar circumstances in 2008 by Michelle Obama.  The press, in their inimitable capacity to make the unimportant sound earth-shattering, are all over the story.

I am extremely concerned with the fact that job growth has died in this country and millennials all over the nation cannot find work.  I'm concerned that our borders are flung wide open to the deserving, the undeserving and the enemy equally.  I'm concerned that the Democrats are about to nominate a woman with a track record of failure at every position she has had, but at least has a uterus and thereby self-qualified.

Mostly, I am concerned that our Federal government is spending about a buck-fifty for every dollar in revenues coming in, and accordingly owes $20 trillion (with a "tr") to creditors including our enemies like China. that I am concerned about, because that is actually important.

So let's talk about the speech.  And let's also recognize that Mrs. Trump didn't write it herself.  She finalized some words in it and tweaked them to be her own, but it was written by speechwriters paid to prepare that sort of thing.  We're not talking about "Melania [herself] plagiarizing Michelle", if you know what I mean.

I haven't bothered to look at the actual verbal similarities between the two speeches eight years apart that much, because it is easier to stipulate the similarities and go on from there.  Suffice it to say that they were relatively pap-level phrases like "treat everyone with dignity" and "my word is my bond."

No, I would prefer to ask how it might be possible for the people surrounding the Trumps, who write the drafts of the speech that Mrs. Trump gave, to have thought it worthwhile to pull content from a speech made by Michelle Obama in the totally analogous situation eight years earlier -- or from whatever source Mrs. Obama took it from originally.

If you believe there is a non-coincidental connection between the two, then I really want to hear someone trace through the process by which Mrs. Obama's words would have appeared on the radar screen of one or more of the speechwriters, and someone said "That sounds good, let's use those two paragraphs there."

I don't see how that happens.  If someone on the writing team were even going to look at a similar speech, do you think they would have gone to Michelle Obama's speech?  And if they had done so, how much would they had to have wanted to throw a monkey wrench in the process to put words in that were intentionally lifted to where someone would have recognized the similarity.  This is 2016, after all.

OK, I'm going to interrupt myself by saying that this still has to be the least important aspect of the convention's first day, but we find ourselves talking about it, instead of the impassioned words of Rudy Giuliani and David Clarke, Chris Christie and Donald Trump, Jr..  Argh.

But if you are sitting out there reading this, and possibly think that the similarity of words was intentional, then I ask you to consider the process.  Knowing that speech texts (except for Hillary's to Wall Street banks) are incredibly available, please tell me a reasonable timeline and process flow that would have someone going to Mrs. Obama's text from 2008, taking the words and putting them into the speech to be given by Donald Trump's wife, knowing their attribution would be immediately possible.

It is not important even a shred.  But at least think through the logic.  The exercise is worth it. 

Copyright 2016 by Robert Sutton
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