We do expect the ideas that go into the speeches to be original, however, and that the speech should reflect that. If the lines are verbatim from a speech written for a run at the Massachusetts governorship, shouldn't we wonder how authentic they are when recycled for someone running for president?

Most likely, one that goes to authenticity.  If this really does look like Obama is just the latest vessel for a smart marketing campaign - that it's not his message, it's Axelrod's - then I think it hurts him.  

But I agree.  It isn't so much that it's egregiously offensive as being phony enough to steal the words of others, but the Clinton camp has had a very good line about having a candidacy that relies heavily on rhetoric, the words should be his own.

The repetition of themes, using the exact same words, looks gimmicky.

Here's a news flash.  He doesn't write most of his speeches.  He tells his speechwriting staff to come up with speeches that convey a message.  They write them.  He reads them and approves them.  He then delivers them.

People, this is political rhetoric.  Nothing more.  Nothing less.  

Kidding of course. But it should have made one think.

If we are gong to pay this game, are we 100% sure Deval used it first?

And both of them are echoing Ted Sorensen, and to some degree Martin Luther King. Does the fact that King lifted any number of rhetorical tropes in his "I have a dream" speech make you question King's authenticity, or that of his message?

Besides,  Hillary Clinton doesn't write her speeches either, and she cribs from other politicians relentlessly. Apart from appropriating Obama's "yes we can" and "fired up, ready to go" and Giuliani's "tested, ready, now" business, Hillary Clinton's speeches, with few exceptions, are patchworks of well-worn rhetoric from her husband's administration, the women's movement, and a number of other sources, intermingled with  bulleted (but actually not very detailed) policy laundry lists.

Yesterday I didn't think this was such a big deal. Today I do. How can we believe in the genuineness of his message of hope, optimism and change when he cribbed it from another politician?

Of course this is a huge deal.  And there's probably even more where this came from.

I don't care if they share speechwriters or not,  Obama is being marketed to people as something fresh, something new, and his stump speeches to the people--his words--are what his entire campaign relies upon to be convincing of the "newness".  How can you accomplish that when your words have already been run by someone else?  This isn't an homage situation, either.

The singular hypocrisy of that -- ahem -- "movement" is going to force me out of this Political Party.

Of course it's a non-issue when Obama does something wrong.  It's not wrong!

Duh!!

And this is why it matters that Barack Obama is now furiously trying to suggest that it's "no big deal" that he plagiarized his friend's, Deval Patrick's, speech. He's even claiming that Mr. Patrick told him to use the speech. Perhaps Mr. Patrick did. Perhaps Mr. Patrick told him to use the speech and never told him to say it was written by Mr. Patrick and not by Mr. Obama. It doesn't matter, actually, what Mr. Patrick said or did not say to Mr. Obama. What matters is that Mr. Obama passed this speech off as his own, adding only his by now customary flourishes of tone and inflection. That the man who has presented himself to this country as the man of integrity and change turns out to be a fraud -- and that is what we call people who pretend that someone else's words are their own -- must be a profound disappointment for his supporters, if they can be honest enough with themselves to admit it.

However, what's even more disheartening and heartbreaking is this: Mr. Obama, in his historic bid for the Presidency, represented an ideal with whom children from broken homes, of mixed racial origins, of no great means, of inner turmoil who seek refuge in drugs, could all look up to and strive to be. In one fell swoop of his unwritten-with pen, he has dashed the hope that here stood a man who pulled himself together and got it together.

On the dark side, everyone in the media has become aware that there is a intensely lack of originality in Obama's words and his words now doom him. What was his strength is now his greatest weakness.

(One mydd.com writer suggests that Obama and Patrick share a speechwriter, who got careless about whose words he put into which speech.)

If this was all there was to it, no big deal--not even a small deal.

This strikes me as part of broader concerns, that BO is DP 2.0, that Axelrod had a major hand in something that worked and did it again; the broader themes and the candidates are striking in their similarities. Feels like someone crafting a formula for a successful TV show in England, bringing it to the USA--not unlike American Idol....