Obama Scores, Clinton Flops on Copy Cat Spat

Amanda Carpenter | February 21, 2008 9:16 PM

The moderator asked Obama to discuss his speech lines that resemble Deval Patrick's.

Obama says: "The notion that I plagiarized from somebody who is one of my national co-chairs who gave me the line and suggested I use it, I think is silly. This is where we start getting to silly season in politics and people start getting discouraged by it."

He adds, "We shouldn’t spend time tearing each other down, we should be spending time lifting the country up."

Crowd goes wild.

Clinton is asked to respond. She says, "If your candidacy is going to be about words then they should be your own words." There's applause, but it' s mild. Then she goes too far.

"Lifting whole passages from someone else’s speeches is not change you can believe in," she says. "It’s change you can Xerox."

It backfires. Crowd boos.

This'll be the clip replayed on all the shows if it doesn't get uglier.