With less than a month left for the U.S. Presidential election, both Republican candidate Donald Trump and Democrat Joe Biden are leaving no stones unturned to woo voters. If Trump is being criticized for coming out in the open despite being tested positive for COVID-19, past charges of plagiarism have come to haunt Biden.
Biden has been accused of plagiarism at least in three situations, including his past presidential campaign. The first time he was criticized for copied content was in 1988, when he started campaigning to be the Democrat candidate. Biden had allegedly lifted the portions of the speech by United Kingdom Labour MP Neil Kinnock who had contested against Margaret Thatcher.
Not only did he copy the portions of the speech, but during the campaign at Iowa State Fair Biden even enacted Kinnock's speech. He also said that he was the first in a thousand generations to graduate from college, gesturing to his wife exactly how Kinnock had done during his speech. However, he contradicted his own claim later in the speech by saying that he had relatives who attended college. This was an unsuccessful try and he dropped out of the race shortly.
Copied as Student at Law School
The second incident of plagiarism by Biden is traced back to his student days. According to an article in New York Times, published in 1987, Biden had acknowledged to have copied others' content when he was a student at Syracuse University of Law. He agreed to have plagiarized a law review article for a paper he wrote in his first year at law school. But he also tried to justify his actions by saying that it was not a big mistake as he had misunderstood the need to cite sources carefully. Apart from plagiarism, even this attitude made him the talk of the town.
The third time he was accused of plagiarizing content was quite recent, when he released the climate change plan in June 2019. The climate plan is said to have been copied and pasted with superficial changes taken from various advocacy organizations, policy shops, and one portion of it was copied from a Vox article, stated reports.
Climate Change Plan Row
This issue was first noticed by Josh Nelson, vice president at the progressive group CREDO. He had claimed that Biden's plan had explained the technology designed to capture and store power plants' carbon dioxide emissions were in the same language as in the documents released by the nongovernmental organization Center for Climate and Energy Solutions. Criticism about the same led to Biden's staff making quick corrections. Several citations were reportedly left out of the final version of the 22-page climate plan document.
Currently, the U.S. is all set to go for voting on November 3, 2020. According to Reuters/Ipsos opinion polls released on October 6, out of the six key states, Biden is leading in Michigan, Wisconsin Pennsylvania and Arizona whereas he is tied with Trump in Florida and North Carolina.
