Politicians’ words should be their own

The year was 1972, and an ad in Chicago Today (“Wanted: Writers. Flexible hours.”) led me to a building on LaSalle Street. I was 21, desperate for a job and wearing the Montgomery Ward suit I’d gotten for graduation. Before long, I was shaking hands with the president of Termpapers Inc., who hired me without bothering to look at the portfolio I brought along.

That day, I accepted orders for a 15-page paper on Bantu education in Africa and a 10-pager on the Attica prison riot.

Six weeks and approximately 50 term papers later, I showed up at LaSalle Street to find a notice taped to the door: “Closed by order of the U.S. Marshal.”

Government lawyers had gotten a cease-and-desist order for fraud, forgery, plagiarism and subversion of the educational system. Harvard University vowed lawsuits against term-paper mills for breaking “an implicit educational contract” between colleges and students.

Standing before that sealed door, I was in mild shock. Yes, the work had felt nefarious at first, but I had been assured by the company president that it was all aboveboard. We writers were agreeing to let someone else use our words for fair compensation. “Just like political speechwriters,” was his rationale.

Today, selling term papers to students to use as their own is still illegal, but selling speeches to politicians to use as their own remains legitimate.

How can that be?

The fact that the writers give permission to the speakers to pretend it’s their own work does not make it okay.

Nor can second-party speechwriting be justified because it isn’t journalism or scholastic scholarship. Some speechwriters have likened their profession to screenwriting, penning dialogue to be spoken by others. But in the entertainment world, the audience knows the actors don’t write their own material, and authors are acknowledged in screen credits or theater programs.

When was the last time you saw or heard a writer credited at the end of a speech by John McCain or Barack Obama?

Nor can the difference be that political audiences are already aware that politicians employ speechwriters. Granted, it can be easy to determine when President Bush is reciting from someone else’s script and when he is ad libbing in his own fractured English. But how can we know whether a line, or an entire speech, comes from the brains of McCain or Obama, or from hired staffers?

All those years ago, Harvard’s lawyer referred to the implicit understanding between teachers and students. Isn’t it even more important that there be a contract of honesty between candidates for high office and voters?

When Richard Nixon used to recite the essays of his speechwriter William Safire, you ended up knowing quite a bit about Safire and little or nothing about Nixon. Think how much more we might have known, and how history might even have been different, had Nixon spoken his mind from the start.

Can voters this year be sure they learned something about the real Sarah Palin from her acceptance speech Wednesday night, considering news that it was originally written by speechwriter Matthew Scully over a week ago for an unknown male nominee? The commissioned draft was subsequently customized by Palin and a team of McCain staffers in the 48 hours leading up to its presentation.

Psychologists, college admissions officers and personnel directors all know that when it comes to extracting truth and character there is no more reliable indicator than a person’s original, written words. Why, then, as we watch two finalists compete for the most important job in the world, do we tolerate their lip-syncing of someone else’s creation?

David McGrath teaches English at the University of South Alabama.