Clinton campaign accuses Obama of being copycat

BY GLENN THRUSH | glenn.thrush@newsday.com

April 21, 2008

PHILADELPHIA - Hillary Clinton was clearly having a blast during her drop-in television appearance with Stephen Colbert here Thursday, but her campaign's mood soured when aides learned Barack Obama would be appearing on the same show via satellite.

"I can't believe it - he's such a copycat," fumed a person close to Clinton, telling Newsday that the candidate herself said she was surprised by Obama's Colbert Nation invasion.

Obama spokesman Bill Burton said his boss was simply taking the show up on repeated requests that he appear - and that the producers had suggested the Thursday time slot. Colbert's spokeswoman didn't return calls for comment during the weekend.

"I'm not surprised the Clinton campaign is attacking us for going on 'The Colbert Report' - since their campaign is 100-percent negative," Burton said. "But I do have to say this is about the lamest attack they've come up with so far."

The Colbert clash captures the growing bitterness between two exhausted campaigns on the eve of the latest do-or-die contest. But it also reflects a deeper resentment among Clinton insiders over what they believe is Obama's penchant for pilfering their ideas, the political equivalent of the popular kid rising to the top of the class by cribbing the nerdy valedictorian's notes.

"Senator Obama has clearly followed us on an entire range of issues," says Clinton policy chief Neera Tanden. "It raises a fundamental question: If Senator Obama can't propose his own major policies during the campaign, how is he going to do it as president?"

Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell, a top Clinton surrogate, said, "He's clearly picking up a lot of her stuff, especially on economic stimulus. It's really noticeable."

To make its point, the Clinton campaign is circulating a memo to surrogates that details alleged Obama policy lifts on issues including the establishment of a national infrastructure bank, creation of 5 million new "green collar" jobs and a plan to force colleges to adopt a universal financial aid form.

Clinton, who prides herself on being a policy wonk, is particularly peeved about what she believes to be Obama's borrowing of her economic-stimulus and foreclosure-relief packages - two critical plans in such hard-hit primary states as Pennsylvania, Indiana and North Carolina.

"I came up with that a year ago," she quipped to an audience in Bethlehem yesterday, referring to her plan to allocate billions to states for mortgage assistance programs.

In many cases, Clinton's camp argues, Obama cut-and-pasted Clinton proposals, then tossed in a few hundred million in funding to make him look bolder. One example cited in the memo was Clinton's Oct. 11, 2007, proposal to more than double the tax credit for public college students to $3,500. A month later, Obama proposed a similar plan - but one-upped Clinton by raising the maximum credit to $4,000.

In October, Clinton rolled out a proposal to set aside $1 billion to help states develop paid family leave programs. A month later, the Illinois senator rolled out a similar policy - with an extra $500 million.

Burton denied that Obama has willfully borrowed any proposal from Clinton - and countered that it's Clinton who is copying Obama on Iraq, the most crucial issue she's faced in the Senate. Citing news accounts, Burton claims that Clinton purposely waited for Obama to cast his "no" vote on the May 2005 Iraq supplemental funding vote before she herself voted no, and suggested that she backed the Reid-Feingold plan to end the war only after he did so publicly. "Who's copying who?" he asked.

But one Clinton adviser, speaking on condition of anonymity, claims such arguments mask a basic difference: that Clinton is obsessed with specific solutions through detailed policy proposals, while Obama is obsessed with message and is content to leave granular details to staff.

Still, a fight over policy plagiarism was probably inevitable in a 15-month campaign between two Democrats who now tout virtually identical policy positions on health care, foreign policy and economic stimulus, experts say.

"They are down to hairsplitting because there really aren't any significant differences between them anymore," said Hunter College politics professor Andrew Polsky.