I’m confused. I thought Obama used Deval Patrick’s speechwriter, no?

On that score, it was none other than Hillary Clinton who accused Obama of not merely using a speechwriter but actually plagiarizing Patrick, with the cutting line, “Lifting whole passages from someone else’s speeches is not change you can believe in, it’s change you can Xerox.” (Though a woman, Hillary is a liberal Democrat, so the media portrayed her slicing and dicing of Obama as deft, rather than shrill.) At Slate, Jack Shafer offered these observations, which managed to lump in that other well known original thinker, Joe Biden:

Patrick and Obama, who rely on the same campaign wizard, David Axelrod, have shared enough campaign rhetoric to be declared separated at birth, as this Boston Globe article from 10 months ago shows. Here’s additional evidence of Patrick-Obama sharing from Jake Tapper’s blog. As someone who has endorsed and advised Obama, Patrick occupies the position of a campaign volunteer or even a collaborator. Given the conventions of campaign oratory, I’d have a hard time diagnosing plagiarism on Obama’s part—as opposed to poor form—unless Patrick alleged that his friend fleeced his words, which he hasn’t and won’t.
If there is an undiscovered country of plagiarism, it is the less scrutinized region of performance. Sen. Joseph Biden, a thoroughly imperfect candidate, learned this the hard way during his 1988 run for the presidency.
Biden was accused of plagiarizing British politician Neil Kinnock at the Iowa State Fair, where he used Kinnock’s words without credit. Even though Biden had previously cited Kinnock while giving this spiel, what ultimately murdered his candidacy in the eyes of his critics was the fact that he had also lifted Kinnock’s “gestures and lyrical Welsh syntax intact,” as Maureen Dowd reported in breaking the story for the New York Times.