How is everyone having sampled “fired up and ready to go” (Obama first, then Clinton and McCain) different than Obama sampling Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick‘s “just words” riff? There’s nothing to get into here. It’s small. The desperation of the Clinton team is sad. Obama and Clinton are now in a statistical dead heat in Texas and they’re scared.
What I’m about to say I say as an effete white guy who’s owned exactly two hip-hop albums in his life (Dr. Dre‘s The Chronic and Wu Tang Clan Forever), but there’s a reason that sampling — the act of taking a portion, or sample, of one sound recording and reusing it as an element of a new recording — became a common music industry practice in the ’90s without this or that performer freaking out and yelling “plagiarism!” like Hillary spokesperson Howard Wolfson did yesterday.
Obama wasn’t stealing from Gov. Patrick by taking his words — he was reusing them as an element in an Obama speech. (He said the words a bit differently than Patrick, employing that special Obama pizazz.) You can’t expect the Hillary whitebreads to understand this, but this is basically why Obama said earlier today it’s “no big deal.” I also think he could have observed the rules and attributed the quote to Patrick, but to have done so would have interfered with the rhythm, and for a gifted orator rhythm is more than half the game. So that was another factor.