I interrupted my discussion of political plagiarism to pay tribute to William F. Buckley, who died last week. Today I want to resume the subject.

When the charge of “plagiarism” is applied to political rhetoric, I always smile a speechwriter’s smile. Because I sometimes wonder if political rhetoric is anything else.

For example, Abraham Lincoln’s famous 1858 speech, “A house divided against itself cannon stand,” was derived from one of the sayings of Jesus. In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus declares: "Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation; and every city or house divided against itself shall not stand.”

Interestingly, eight years earlier, in a debate over the Compromise of 1850, Sen. Sam Houston had said something quite similar: "A nation divided against itself cannot stand.”

Of course, in the mid-19th Century, Americans knew the Bible much better than they do today, and so they probably recognized that both Lincoln and Houston were appealing to Scripture. Nobody accused either of them of plagiarism at the time.

Nor, to the best of my knowledge, did anyone accuse Franklin Roosevelt or John F. Kennedy of plagiarizing the most famous lines associated with each of them.

FDR’s most famous line, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” goes back at least as far as 1580, to an essay by Michel de Montaigne: “The thing of which I have most fear is fear.” In 1623, Sir Francis Bacon expressed the same idea this way, “Nothing is terrible except fear itself.” And, in 1832, the Duke of Wellington chimed in with, “The only thing I am afraid of is fear.”

Ditto John F. Kennedy’s, “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.” That one goes back at least as far as 1884, when Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. appealed to an audience to “recall what our country has done for each of us, and to ask ourselves what we can do for our country in return.” More than likely, however, JFK had in mind his headmaster at Choate prep school, Rev. George St. John, who was always exhorting students not to ask what their school could do for them, but what they could do for their school.

So is there no such thing as plagiarism in political speech? I wouldn’t go quite that far.

In my opinion, if a politician steals someone else’s original eloquence –- as opposed to an idea or turn of phrase that’s been kicking around in one form or another for years -- and passes it off as his own, that is plagiarism.

In 1987, for example, Sen. Joe Biden plagiarized a speech from British Labor Party leader Neil Kinnock, and the slip may well have cost him the Democratic nomination for the presidency. “Why is it,” he asked in a speech he gave in Iowa, “that Joe Biden is the first in his family ever to go a university? Why is it that my wife . . . is the first in her family to ever go to college? Is it because our fathers and mothers were not bright? . . . Is it because they didn't work hard? My ancestors who worked in the coal mines of northeast Pennsylvania and would come after 12 hours and play football for four hours? It's because they didn't have a platform on which to stand.”

Neil Kinnock, a descendant of Welsh coal miners, had given the original speech, and Biden changed just a few words. Was this plagiarism? Even Biden tacitly admitted that it was, because on several previous occasions when he used those lines, he had given due credit to Kinnock. It was only on that occasion in Iowa that he quoted the lines without attribution, to his everlasting chagrin.

More recently, in September of 2005, former Vice President Al Gore committed a blatant theft from Winston Churchill. Speaking at the Clinton Global Initiative in New York City, Gore warned that Hurricane Katrina was just a sample of the natural disasters that we could expect as the result of global warming. “Katrina,” he intoned, “is the first sip, the first taste, of a bitter cup that will be proffered to us over and over again.”

Speaking on the floor of the House of Commons after Britain’s shameful capitulation to Hitler at Munich in 1938, Churchill had said, “This is only the first sip, the first foretaste of a bitter cup which will be proffered to us year by year …”

How could Gore have been so brazen –- or so dumb? Surely he must have realized that the “bitter cup” phrase would be the sound bite of the speech, as indeed it was. Did he think his rhetorical pilfering would pass unnoticed?

So let this be a lesson to political speechwriters: Never steal anything that hasn’t been stolen a few times before.

This past Wednesday night, I attended a Houston Grand Opera performance of Jake Heggie’s new opera, Last Acts. It’s a touching chamber work about strained relations and between a famous actress (sung by famous mezzo-soprano Frederica von Stade) and her grown children, an unhappily married daughter and a gay son whose lover is dying of AIDS (sung by newcomers Kristin Clayton and Keith Phares).

Usually, I don’t care much for contemporary music, but Heggie’s score is easy on the ear. There is a particularly lovely duet at the end of the first act. The grown children, brother and sister, are on the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, which was a special place for their parents. In a poignant scene, they search their memories for a few details about the father they lost when they were little more than babies. To their mutual anguish, they find that they can recall only fragments -- and even on these their recollections don’t agree. Their father is not even a shadow to them any longer.

Maestro Heggie is the friend of a friend of mine, so I was fortunate enough to meet him when he was in Houston a few years ago for the premiere of his earlier opera, The End of the Affair. He impressed me by his youth and his talent, and also by his graciousness and modesty. I noted that when talking about a scene in The End of the Affair he said, “the music is very strong there” –- not “my music is very strong there.” That kind of modesty about one’s own work is rare in any line of creative endeavor.

Heggie’s modesty was also evident in his program notes for the production of his latest opera. He lavished praise not only on his librettist, Gene Scheer, but also on his longtime collaborator Terrence McNally, who wrote the play on which the opera is based.

He even went so far as to praise librettists in general. “I cannot fathom,” he wrote, “why it is common practice in opera to leave the librettist’s name off the billing. Why is it only Mozart’s Cosi fan tutti and not Mozart and Da Ponte’s? Yes, music makes it an opera. But if the libretto isn’t strong, the opera will be flawed.”

That’s true enough, but in opera, strong tunes will often carry weak writing. Most of the great operas have undistinguished libretti. La Traviata, Tosca, Madame Butterfly and The Girl of the Golden West, to name a few, were based on stage plays that were popular in their time. But had the plays not been set to music, they would all have all sunk to obscurity by now. (Several decades ago, in San Francisco, I saw a revival the original David Belasco play, The Girl of the Golden West. Despite the best efforts of some talented and attractive young actors, the play was a period piece that displayed only intermittent signs of life.)

To be sure, there have been some great librettists. In addition to Da Ponte, we can point to Hugo von Hofmannsthal, who collaborated with Richard Strauss on six of the latter’s operas. (Hofmannsthal’s libretto for Die Rosenkavalier has proved interesting enough in its own right to be performed as a play, without Strauss’ music, at Vienna’s Burgtheater.) And there’s Arrigo Boito, who brilliantly adapted Shakespeare’s Othello and The Merry Wives of Windsor for Verdi.

But after that, the pickings get slim. The poet W.H. Auden collaborated with Benjamin Britten on an operatic version of the Paul Bunyan story and, with the help of his partner Chester Kallman, produced a libretto for Igor Stravinsky’s opera, The Rake’s Progress. Gian Carlo Menotti wrote the libretti for his operas The Consul and The Saint of Bleeker Street, and won Pulitzer Prizes for both of them. And I suppose the list of great librettists should include Emanuel Schikaneder, who wrote the libretto for Mozart’s The Magic Flute.

Who else ranks as a great librettist?

Still, composers need libretti –- even libretti of indifferent quality -- to get them started and, for that reason alone, perhaps the writers’ names should be on the program, although in smaller type.

Jake Heggie said of the Terrence McNally play that inspired his latest opera, “It sang to me.”

Can any writer ask for higher praise than that? How many speechwriters can boast of having written a speech that “sang”?

A reader responded to my last post on composers and writers by calling attention to a YouTube video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jjXyqcx-mYY) that treated Sen. Barack Obama’s “Yes, We Can” speech in Nashua, New Hampshire as a song.

The video was amusing to watch, but at the same time it gave me pause. It reminded me that back in the 1960s, Sammy Davis Jr. had a hit song called, “Yes, I Can.” I’m rather surprised that the media hasn’t pointed the similarity between the two refrains.

My memory of the song was rather hazy, so I looked up the lyrics, and found them to be astonishingly topical. For those who don’t remember him in his heyday, Sammy Davis Jr. (1925-1990) was a slender black man with a velvet voice and a lot of animation.

But read the lyrics and see if they if they don’t remind you of someone else:

Yes, I can, suddenly
Yes, I can …

I was just born today,
I can go all the way.
Yes, I can.

Will Senator Obama go all the way? That is the question of the hour.

There was once a prominent Scottish-American minister, who was famed for the quality of his preaching. When other clergymen asked him how they might acquire his felicity with the spoken word, he would assume a mock-serious expression, raise an admonitory finger and reply with his musical Scottish burr, “You must be born again -– with an Irish grandfather.”

Oscar Wilde did not exaggerate when he said that the Irish are the greatest talkers since the Greeks. For proof, one need look no further than Great Irish Speeches, a new anthology of Irish eloquence, assembled by Richard Aldous, head of the history department of University College Dublin. It’s available from Amazon for $12.99.

Professor Aldous has selected 50 exceptional speeches by Irish political leaders, dating from the late 18th Century to the present. About a third of these speeches deal with Ireland’s struggle to become an independent nation; the rest deal with the struggle to determine what kind of an independent nation Ireland ought to be. That is a question that preoccupies the Irish people to this day.

Political questions are never simple in Ireland. Initially, there was the question of whether Irish patriots should pursue self-determination by constitutional means or by violence. So the speeches of statesmen –- Grattan, O’Connell and Parnell –- are counterpointed by the speeches of revolutionaries –- Wolfe Tone, Robert Emmet and Patrick Pearse.

Pearse, who died before a British firing squad for his part in the Easter Rising of 1916, is represented by a fiery funeral oration that he gave the year before. “Life springs from death;” he exhorted his audience, “and from the graves of patriot men and women spring living nations … while Ireland holds these graves, Ireland unfree shall never be at peace.”

Prophetic words. The quest for Irish freedom was further complicated by the fact that six counties in Northern Ireland, known as Ulster, had Protestant majorities. Protestant Irishmen asserted their own right to self-determination by demanding to remain part of Great Britain. “Ulster is not asking for concessions,” fulminated Sir Edward Carson in a 1914 speech against home rule for Ireland. "Ulster is asking to be let alone.”

Ulster remained part of Britain when the Irish Free State was established in 1921. But she was not let alone. She was plagued by bitter sectarian violence between the ruling Protestants and the insurgent Catholic minority for decades afterwards. Between 1966 to 2007, the period known as “the troubles,” over 3700 inhabitants of Northern Ireland lost their lives before peace was finally established. Professor Aldous’ anthology includes speeches by Bernadette Devlin, Gerry Adams and Ian Paisley, leading figures of that era.

Meanwhile, the Republic of Ireland, despite having been born of revolution, settled down to being a notably conservative country over which the Catholic Church exercised vast sway. In 1925, the church demanded a total ban on divorce, which was technically available through the Irish senate. The poet William Butler Yeats, then a member of that body, replied with a furious speech warning of dire consequences if the church got its way. “If you show that this country, Southern Ireland, is going to be governed by Catholic ideas and Catholic ideas alone,” argued Yeats, “you will never get the North. You will create an impassable barrier between South and North, and you will pass more and more Catholic laws, while the North will, gradually, assimilate its divorce and other laws to those of England. You will put a wedge into the midst of this nation.”

Sixty years later, Irish deputy Des O’Malley was to make the case –- in almost identical terms and with equal lack of success -- for legislation to permit the sale of condoms without a prescription. His speech is included in the anthology, as is the 1986 speech on reform of the divorce laws by prime minister Garret FitzGerald –- a reform measure that also failed. It was not until 1990s that Ireland caught up with the sexual revolution. The sale of condoms was permitted, divorce became available and homosexual activity between consenting adults was decriminalized.

Intriguingly, Irish-American President John F. Kennedy played a subtle role in the gradual liberalization of Irish attitudes. When Kennedy visited in Ireland in June of 1963, the government still censored books found objectionable by the Catholic Church. Kennedy took advantage of the rapturous reception he received from the Irish people to send a message to the politicians. In his address to the Dail, the Irish parliament, he made a pointed reference to James Joyce, who was still considered a “dirty” writer by those in power.

The reference, moreover, came during one of the most heart-melting passages of a rhetorical masterpiece. On this occasion, Kennedy surpassed even himself:

Our two nations, divided by distance, have been united by history. No people ever believed more deeply in the cause of Irish freedom than the people of the United States. And no country contributed more to building my own than your sons and daughters. They came to our shores in a mixture of hope and agony, and I would not underrate the difficulties of their course once they arrived in the United States. They left behind hearts, fields and a nation yearning to be free. It is no wonder that James Joyce described the Atlantic as a bowl of bitter tears, and an earlier poet wrote, “They are going, going, going and we cannot bid them stay."

Kennedy concluded his speech with the line, “Ireland’s hour has come” –- a line that resonated so deeply with the Irish people that nearly a quarter-century later, prime minister Bertie Ahern would quote it when he was accorded the rare honor of addressing a joint session of the British Parliament.

Mr. Ahern’s speech ends this splendid anthology, and the concluding paragraph of his speech will end today’s post to this blog. Mr. Ahern said this:

Today I can say to this Parliament at Westminster, as John Kennedy said in Dublin, “Ireland’s hour has come.” It came, not as victory or defeat, but as a shared future for all. Solidarity has made us stronger. Reconciliation has brought us closer. Ireland’s hour has come: a time of peace, of prosperity, of old values and new beginnings. This is the great lesson and the great gift of Irish history. This is what Ireland can give to the world.

Happy St. Patrick’s Day, March 17.

Sen. Barack Obama has just delivered another spellbinding speech, this time on racial reconciliation. It was eloquent and it was brilliant. Senator Obama did not ignore or minimize this country’s tortured racist past, but he offered hope that, ultimately, we could rise above it.

In the course of his speech, he disavowed the inflammatory statements made by his former pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, without disowning the man who had been his friend and mentor. Rather, he said, in effect, that Rev. Wright’s sentiments belonged to the past that we must rise above.

To me, the crucial paragraph of the speech was this:

“The profound mistake of Reverend Wright’s sermons is not that he spoke about racism in our society. It’s that he spoke as if our society was static; as if no progress has been made; as if this country –- a country that has made it possible for one of his own members to run for the highest office in the land and build a coalition of white and black; Latino and Asian, rich and poor, young and old -- is still irrevocably bound to a tragic past. But what we know -- what we have seen –- is that America can change. That is true genius of this nation. What we have already achieved gives us hope –- the audacity to hope –- for what we can and must achieve tomorrow.”

These are noble words; healing words; a statesman’s words. If Sen. Obama can back up these visionary words with forward-looking actions, he might make a great president.

The question is, can he? Or is he bound hand and foot to those Democratic Party constituencies most resistant to change –- such as the AFL-CIO, the trial lawyers and the teacher unions.

Republican strategist Karl Rove shrewdly put his finger on Obama’s dilemma in a column he wrote in the Wall Street Journal last month.

“The truth,” declared Rove, “is that Mr. Obama is unwilling to challenge special interests if they represent the financial and political muscle of the Democratic left. He says yes to the lobbyists of the AFL-CIO when they demand card-check legislation to take away the right of workers to have a secret ballot in unionization efforts, or when they oppose trade deals. He won't break with trial lawyers, even when they demand the ability to sue telecom companies that make it possible for intelligence agencies to intercept communications between terrorists abroad. And he is now going out of his way to proclaim fidelity to the educational unions. This is a disappointment since he'd earlier indicated an openness to education reform. Mr. Obama backs their agenda down the line, even calling for an end to testing, which is the only way parents can know with confidence whether their children are learning and their schools working.”

In this latest speech, as he has in other speeches, Sen. Obama even managed to pay lip service to conservative ideals. In this latest speech, it was to the “notion of self-help.” Clearly, he’s trying to appeal to Americans of all ethnic backgrounds and all political persuasions. But unless he can resolve the contradiction between his high-flown rhetoric and his catering to left-wing special interest groups, he runs the risk that many Americans will sooner or later come to regard his speeches as just so much Chinese food: Forty-five minutes later, you’re hungry.

For Lent this year I read Come Be My Light, the private writings of Mother Theresa.

Reading this book was a humbling experience. Mother Theresa founded the Missionaries of Charity in 1950. It was to be an order devoted, in her words, to "the hungry, the naked, the homeless, the crippled, the blind, the lepers all those people who feel unwanted, unloved, uncared for throughout society, people that have become a burden to the society and are shunned by everyone."

Mother Theresa and her sisters served the poorest of the poor by living among them as one of them -- first in Calcutta in India, and then eventually throughout the whole world. By the time she received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979, Mother Theresa had reached the conclusion that “Calcutta is everywhere.” By that, she meant that even those who were materially well off could be spiritually impoverished.

In her Nobel lecture, Mother Theresa underscored this particular paradox by contrasting the smiles on the faces of the dying beggars she nursed in India, with the sad expressions she encountered when she visited comfortable nursing homes in the West: “I saw in that home they had everything,” she said, “but everybody was looking towards the door … And I turned to the sister and I asked: How is it that these people who have everything here, why are they all looking towards the door, why are they not smiling? I am so used to smiles on our people, even the dying ones smile. And she said, ‘This is nearly every day ….They are hoping that a son or daughter will come to visit them. They are hurt because they are forgotten.’ … This is where love comes…. Maybe in our own family we have somebody who is feeling lonely, who is feeling sick, who is feeling worried….Are we there to receive them?”

The lives of saints are invariably paradoxical. Whenever Mother Theresa was asked how she kept the adulation that came with being an international celebrity from infecting her with the sin of pride, she would reply that Jesus had given her a great grace: the deepest conviction of her total nothingness. “If He could find a poorer woman through whom to do his work,” she said, “He would not choose me, but He would choose that woman.”

In the same spirit, she remarked on another occasion that God had been able to accomplish so much through her because she had completely emptied herself to let Him work His will.

Mother Theresa belongs to that very select company of whom the philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, “The mass of men worry themselves into nameless graves, while here and there a great unselfish soul forgets himself into immortality.”

Had he and I but met
By some old ancient inn,
We should have sat us down to wet
Right many a nipperkin!

-- Thomas Hardy

Last week’s issue of the Economist carried the obituary of one Lazare Ponticelli, a French citizen who died on March 11 at the age of 110.

Mr. Ponticelli’s death might have gone unnoticed but for the fact that he was France’s last surviving veteran of World War I, or what the French still refer to as La Grande Guerre.

The French government had offered Mr. Ponticelli a state funeral and other honors, which he declined. He knew that he was being singled out merely because he was the last of the 8.4 million poilus, or foot-soldiers, who had fought for France in the terrible years between 1914 and 1918. Of these, 1,397,800 died and 4,266,000 were wounded.

Mr. Ponticelli, as his surname suggests, was not born in France. He was a native of Italy, whose family had moved to France to find work. In gratitude, he enlisted in the Foreign Legion as an under-age volunteer at 16. When Italy entered the war in 1915, he was forcibly repatriated and served in an Italian Alpine regiment for the duration. Afterwards, he was able to return to his adopted country.

To the end of his long life, he vividly recalled an occasion when his Italian regiment stopped firing on the enemy Austrians for three weeks. During this brief unofficial armistice, the soldiers on both sides swapped loaves of bread for tobacco, took pictures of each other and otherwise fraternized. In his later years, Mr. Ponticelli would share this story with anyone interested in his experiences –- but especially with children. For him, it illustrated the utter insanity of warfare. C’est completment idiot la guerre, he would say, sadly.

He would have agreed with the English poet, Thomas Hardy, who held similar views on war. I began this post with the opening stanzas of Hardy’s poem, “The Man He Killed.” I’m going to end with the last. It goes like this:

Yes; quaint and curious war is!
You shoot a fellow down
You'd treat, if met where any bar is,
Or help to half a crown.

John McCain’s speech on the housing crisis in Santa Ana on March 25 was a dull speech: earnest, plodding, methodical and utterly devoid of any rhetorical flourishes that might set an audience swooning.

Nevertheless, I think it was a good speech. First, he explained the economics behind the housing crash in clear and simple terms, without condescending to his audience.

He put it this way:

A bubble occurs when prices are driven up too quickly, speculators move into markets, and these players begin to suspend the normal rules of risk and assume that prices can only move up - but never down. We've seen this kind of bubble before - in the late 1990s, we had the technology bubble, when money poured into technology stocks and people assumed that those stock values would rise indefinitely. Between 2001 and 2006, housing prices rose by nearly 15 percent every year. The normal market forces of people buying and selling their homes were overwhelmed by rampant speculation. Our system of market checks and balances did not correct this until the bubble burst.

Of those 80 million homeowners, only 55 million have a mortgage at all, and 51 million are doing what is necessary –- working a second job, skipping a vacation, and managing their budgets –- to make their payments on time. That leaves us with a puzzling situation: how could 4 million mortgages cause this much trouble for us all?

A good question, and Sen. McCain had an equally good answer:

The other part of what happened was an explosion of complex financial instruments that weren't particularly well understood by even the most sophisticated banks, lenders and hedge funds. To make matters worse, these instruments -- which basically bundled together mortgages and sold them to others to spread risk throughout our capital markets - were mostly off-balance sheets, and hidden from scrutiny. In other words, the housing bubble was made worse by a series of complex, inter-connected financial bets that were not transparent or fully understood. That means they weren't always managed wisely because people couldn't properly quantify the risk or the value of these bets. And because these instruments were bundled and sold and resold, it became harder and harder to find and connect up a real lender with a real borrower. Capital markets work best when there is both accountability and transparency. In the case of our current crisis, both were lacking.

Because managers did not fully understand the complex financial instruments and because there was insufficient transparency when they did try to learn, the initial losses spawned a crisis of confidence in the markets. Market players are increasingly unnerved by the uncertainty surrounding the level of risk, liability and loss currently in the financial system. Banks no longer trust each other and are increasingly unwilling to put their money to work. Credit is drying up and liquidity is now severely limited – and small business and hard-working families find themselves unable to get their usual loans.

The Senator then promised some “straight talk” on how to deal with the problem, and he delivered:

I will not play election year politics with the housing crisis. I will evaluate everything in terms of whether it might be harmful or helpful to our effort to deal with the crisis we face now.

When we commit taxpayer dollars as assistance, it should be accompanied by reforms that ensure that we never face this problem again. Central to those reforms should be transparency and accountability.

In short, Sen. McCain succinctly analyzed the circumstances that caused the current economic downturn, and then outlined a sensible, hard-headed approach to dealing with it. In reading the speech, I was reminded of Franklin Roosevelt’s fireside chats -– the radio addresses he made to the nation during his presidency. For the most part, they were not memorable speeches, but they were models of simplicity, clarity and sheer persuasiveness. An aide to FDR once said that “he looked for words that he would use in an informal conversation with one or two or his friends.”

If it turns out to be a contest between Obama and McCain for the White House, it will be fascinating to see which of their very different rhetorical styles will sway the voters. Obama can touch people’s hearts; we know that. But in this latest speech, McCain has shown that he can appeal powerfully to their common sense. In the end, the American people may well decide that they love Obama’s platform performances –- but they trust McCain to run the country.

Earlier this week, ABC News senior correspondent Jake Tapper interviewed a Democratic Party official who predicted that Sen. Hillary Clinton could still win the party’s presidential nomination –- but she would have to exercise what he called the “Tonya Harding option” to do it.

In other words, she would have to destroy her rival. She would have to make Sen. Obama totally unacceptable as a candidate for the nation’s highest office.

The DNC official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, asked, plaintively, “Is that really what we Democrats want?”

It remains to be seen whether Sen. Clinton will exercise the “Tonya Harding option” –- but there are plenty of people in both political parties who wouldn’t put it past her.

Some time back, I offered my readers a selection of political quotes from H.L. Mencken as an antidote to the hothouse rhetoric of a presidential campaign season. Today, I’m going to offer a quote from one of my favorite political novels, Democracy by Henry Adams. Although it was published in 1880, it contains many passages that still ring true, even today.

In particular, the novel contains a devastating portrait of an unscrupulous and ruthlessly ambitious senator named Silas Ratcliffe, who intends to be president –- whatever the cost. At one point, Ratcliffe frankly avows to the heroine of the novel that the pleasure of politics lies in the possession of power: “He agreed that the country would do very well without him. ‘But here I am,’ said he, ‘and here I mean to stay.’ He had very little sympathy for thin moralizing, and a statesmanlike contempt for philosophical politics. He loved power, and he meant to be president. That was enough.”

Sound like anyone we know?