The first one received more than 47,000 views on YouTube alone. This may not sound like a lot compared to “viral” videos with more than 1 million views, but it does appear to be the most popular video the White House has posted to its YouTube channel in several months. These days, most top out around 1,000 views, and even Obama’s own speeches are hovering around 20,000. Considering that views of 200,000+ was typical for many videos on Obama’s YouTube channel a year ago, here is an example of how President Obama’s online popularity has diminished. Meanwhile, it might well be fair to say that Goolsbee is the White House’s hottest star.

In addition to the 47,000-times seen video, Goolsbee took the same chart to the Colbert Report, where he squared off with Stephen Colbert and repeated his explanation of the president’s preferred tax bill.

The latest video was released just this morning, and it’s much like the last: Goolsbee stands in front of a pre-drawn chart on a white board and explains what it means. Maybe it’s not quite a true “whiteboard” video like American Public Media’s Marketplace Whiteboard or even those famous UPS ads. It only has a few hundred views as yet, but I’ll bet that’s about to change:

What really sells these, of course, is Goolsbee. He’s got great timing and just the right cadence for a video that’s meant to be both primarily informative and at least somewhat entertaining. One of Goolsbee’s quirkier resume items is having belonged to an improv comedy troupe at Yale, and perhaps it’s no surprise that he tried his hand at stand-up comedy earlier this year:

As this comedy blog observes, he doesn’t exactly knock ‘em dead, but he does have the confidence to deliver a much better performance, given stronger material.

In fact, that’s probably the biggest risk for Goolsbee and the White House — whether their material good enough for prime time. With the midterms in just a few weeks, the 2012 campaign will get under way soon. Is that enough time to work out the economy in small clubs web videos?

For the uninitiated, it refers to a point-by-point refutation of an odious written work, often with an acidic or sardonic tone. The referent is one Robert Fisk, a British columnist whose absurdly self-abegnating columns from Afghanistan made him a pariah, at least until he was forgotten. Forceful responses from bloggers such as Andrew Sullivan gave rise to the term itself.

But this eponym is worth keeping around, and it’s up to armchair cultural anthropologists like yours truly to point out earlier examples of the form where they find them.

Which brings us to the once-popular and still-familiar 1936 book “How to Win Friends and Influence People” by Dale Carnegie. I picked up a copy from Amazon recently, and have been reading it on the Metro to work. In one early chapter, Carnegie explains how persuasion is best accomplished by appealing to your persuadee’s self-interest, and as a counter-example reprints a letter from an officious adman and intersperses it with his own commentary. Carnegie introduces the section thus:

This letter was sent to the managers of local radio stations throughout the country. (I have set down, in brackets, my reactions to each paragraph.)

And here, for your reading interest, is a partial reproduction:

Mr. John Blank,
Blankville,
Indiana
Dear Mr. Blank:

   The —— company desires to retain its position in advertising agency leadership in the radio field.

[Who cares what your company desires? I am worried about my own problems. The bank is foreclosing on my house, the bugs are destroying the hollyhocks, the stuck market tumbled yesterday. I missed the eight-fifteen this morning, I wasn't invited to the Jones's dance last night, the doctor tells me I have high blood pressure and neuritis and dandruff. And then what happens? I come down to the office this morning worried, open my mail and here is some little whippersnapper off in New York yapping about what his company wants. Bah! If he only realized what sort of impression his letter makes, he would get out of the advertising business and start manufacturing sheep dip.]

   This agency’s national advertising accounts were the bulwark of the network. Our subsequent clearances of station time have kept us at the top of agencies year after year.

[You are big and rich and right at the top, are you? So what? I don't give two whoops in Hades if you are as big as General Motors and General Electric and the General Staff of the U.S. Army all combined. If you had as much sense as a half-witted hummingbird, you would realize that I am interested in how big I am--not how big you are. All this talk about your enormous success makes me feel small and unimportant.]

   We desire to service our accounts with the last word on radio station information.

[You desire! You desire. You unmitigated ass. I'm not interested in what you desire or what the President of the United States desires. Let me tell you once and for all that I am interested in what I desire--and you haven't said a word about that yet in this absurd letter of yours.]

Zing! Dale Carnegie wasn’t warblogger, but he certainly could have fit in with those whippersnappers.

I think the only reason there is any controversy is because the first quoted passages, about Georgia and Christianity, are obviously very similar. They are also very short. And in all three examples, the text is purely expository: none of it expresses any thoughts, feelings, emotions or other content that would be an obvious case of intentional plagiarism. Additionally, it’s worth noting that historical facts cannot be plagiarized, only their expression. If there is any here, it’s probably inadvertent.

Meanwhile, consider that plagiarized text is almost always longer than original text. This is because the original writer is likely to state things in as few words as possible while the plagiarizer is trying to hide the origin, which means more words. But here, the McCain speech text is shorter in the second and third examples. The second example is the most alike, as ThinkProgress highlights, but the phrases in common are themselves quite pedestrian, and the other word choices are rather different.

The biggest blow to the plagiarism charge, however, is that the third McCain section actually contains information not in the Wikipedia version. The McCain version notes that Mikheil Saakashvili is a “U.S.-educated lawyer”, but this is not in the Wikipedia passage. Sure, this information is available from Saakashvili’s article, but if that’s the charge, I think the McCain campaign can rest easy. Pretty soon they’ll be accused of doing actual research.

I think that about covers it. Of course, if the campaign did plagiarize it, at least Wikipedia is released under a free public license. And as one Wikipedia editor puts it on the Georgia talk page:

Well, at least we’re being useful to lay readers, rather than specialists; and the extracts appear to be factual…

Update: Keith Olbermann just mentioned the “plagiarism” accusations on Countdown a moment ago, so this just might be the next “100 years” claim (which, curiously, I never seem to hear about anymore).

Novak’s column in this morning’s Post, about Barack Obama’s current overseas travel, affords us the chance to put them together. Here he is on Obama’s recent shift centerward:

Since clinching the nomination, Obama has been cautiously executing a Nixonian post-primary pivot toward the center. He weathered the outrage of his “net-roots” bloggers over his vote for the national security wiretapping bill.

Really, “net-roots”? This is even worse than the Washington Post’s habit of hyphenating the term; when I last mentioned this in March 2007, the term didn’t warrant scare quotes. And I’m pretty sure the punctuation is Novak’s, as I think I’ve been told the Post doesn’t hold opinion writers to the stylebook it applies to the news pages.

On the other hand, if you’re part of the netroots, you have to be at least somewhat pleased that Robert Novak recognizes your political clout — to say nothing of your existence.

N.B. Elsewhere in today’s paper, Jose Antonio Vargas’ report from Netroots Nation refers to them simply as “Netroots,” and that of course is sans quotation marks. As long as “Internet” continues to require capitalization, I’m fine with this formulation.

1. Article: WALL-E
   Why: Disney-Pixar’s latest movie hit theaters this weekend, and it’s unsurprisingly shaping up to be a hit, posting Pixar’s third-best opening ever.
   Detail: Wikipedia aims to be as impartial as possible, but what can you do when the subject is universally acclaimed? You fine-tune the language and cut back on verbatims, as one editor advises: “Well, as you say, the reaction has been overwhelmingly positive, so it will be difficult to get the reception section sounding anything less than a puff piece. However, and speaking as the editor who added the current version of the reception section, I entirely agree that the reviews should be paraphrased better, with fewer direct quotes.”
2. Article: The Stolen Earth
   Why: The penultimate episode of the latest run of Doctor Who episodes on BBC One.
   Detail: Which means there’s a very good chance we’ll see the final episode appear in one of these slots next weekend. Of the numerous British articles included in this list over the past few weeks, Doctor Who has ranked the highest most consistently.
3. Article: 2008 NBA Draft
   Why: If you’ve ever wondered where all these new basketball players come from, perhaps you should learn about the NBA draft.
   Detail: The NBA still hasn’t caught back up with football in national prominence, but basketball fans still eagerly anticipate and closely follow draft night each year. With two televised rounds of thirty picks each and numerous trades, that’s a whole lot of updates on one night — and as Wikirage shows, most edits did occur all on one night.
4. Article: Night of Champions (2008)
   Why: It’s not the WWF, that’s the World Wildlife Federation. It’s WWE now — World Wrestling Entertainment.
   Detail: If the NBA draft is a bit less-attended than the adventures of the Tenth Doctor and his TARDIS (yes, I’ve been skimming the Doctor Who pages) at least it is a little better-attended than this WWE event.

   This page was reverted and protected and reverted, but not necessarily due to vandalism. More the problem seems to be enthusiastic but inexperienced editors adding information in the wrong place and even trying to use the page as a forum. This happens often on some popular subjects, and it makes me wonder about members of the WikiProject Professional wrestling. No doubt the project counts among its members some dedicated and knowledgeable editors, but it seems that they find themselves having to undo a lot of the “help” they get. I doubt the same happens at WikiProject Molecular and Cellular Biology.

5. Article: Guitar Hero World Tour
   Why: Previously titled Guitar Hero IV, makers of the next installment of the popular video game series have continued to make new information available over the past few weeks, but was protected from unhelpful help (see above) until early June. Now the gates are wide open.
   Detail: Allowing people to add spurious rumors such as the planned inclusion of a Soulja Boy track with no guitar instrumentation (since removed). Interesting also that video games seem to show up in this list months ahead of release — the title won’t be out until late October — while movies typically don’t appear until the week of release.
6. Article: Deaths in 2008
   Why: Death and taxes may be inevitable, but only one ranks well in the list of most-edited Wikipedia articles.
   Detail: Passing this week: one of the most influential comedians in my life and the second half of the 20th century, George Carlin. And then some other people, including a 37-year-old American comic book artist of cancer, a 20-year-old Russian-Kazakh model who threw herself from her 9th story Manhattan appartment yesterday afternoon, and the 9-year-old University of Georgia mascot, Uga.
7. Article: District of Columbia v. Heller
   Why: In the session’s most closely-watched decision, the Court affirmed 5-4 that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to own a firearm.
   Detail: Through the week I’ve been somewhat skeptical of the claim bandied about that the case was the first to rule on the Second Amendment, and here is an amusing smackdown of Slate’s lead legal correspondent, who apparently was among the banditos: “We are well aware of U.S. v. Miller, and know much more about it than the sensationalist writer Lithwick. The article does not say that D.C. v. Heller is the first case to pertain to the Second Amendment or that has incidental remarks that could be interpreted as pertaining to the question of individual-rights vs. collective-rights; it is not the first such case, nor is it the second. It is, however, the first case to definitively or directly or comprehensively address the question.”
8. Article: Battlefield: Bad Company
   Why: Not the English rock supergroup, but a new video game from Electronic Arts which “puts the player in a fictional war against Russia, where gamers will lead a squad of AWOL soldiers fighting both Russians and Mercenaries.”
   Detail: I can’t really tell where all the edits went, except that editors have removed some unnecesary sections, but I was a bit surprised to find out that this page has existed since August 2006, presumably when it was first announced.
9. Article: 2008 WWE Draft
   Why: Did you know the WWF WWE had a draft? Or maybe that should be “draft”? If it wasn’t for Wikipedia and this feature, I wouldn’t.
   Detail: Do you think Vince McMahon is mocking David Stern?
10. Article: Camp Rock
    Why: The Disney Channel sitcom all but ignored in last week’s edition because I was trying to pay attention at Personal Democracy Forum is back again, down to the tenth slot from the third.
    Detail: For I think the first time, Disney holds the first and last articles on this list.

Holdovers this week: Camp Rock

Falling off the list: Everything else.

Recurring themes: Top American film releases, Doctor Who episodes, the NBA, Disney.

Honorable mention: I would have thought Carlin would have been ranked higher. Instead, it looks as if his page was edited heavily on June 22 but not much thereafter. And while there was some coverage this past week of the young woman who was fired for editing Tim Russert’s article before his death was officially announced, less has been said about Carlin’s article though an edit war of sorts took place here. Several people tried to add the correct data, only to have other editors ask for more information, changing the article back until receiving confirmation.

Meanwhile, you still can’t say the seven dirty words on television, but as the headline implies, you most certainly can say them on Wikipedia. In the proper context, of course.

P.S. For what it’s worth, I feel compelled to note that I have made a few disclosed edits to a handful of Disney movie articles for distributor Buena Vista. However, I have not contributed to the Disney movies listed here — haven’t been asked and haven’t needed to do so.

Images courtesy andy castro, noamgalai and eyewash design on Flickr.

Everybody’s calling Eliot Spitzer’s fall “Shakespearean.” I’ve seen the comparison made in The Wall Street Journal, on blogs, even on Fox News, and I wonder if other Shakespeare scholars find this as cringe-worthy as I do. Even if he did quote Hamlet in his high school yearbook, Spitzer’s story is in no way Shakespearean and he certainly is nothing like a Shakespearean hero. Not even a little bit.

Characters like Hamlet or Macbeth are destroyed by the virtues which lifted them to greatness in the first place. The most remarkable feature of the whole Spitzer debacle, his extreme hypocrisy, is maybe the one characteristic all Shakespearean tragic heroes lack. …

All [these pundits] are saying is that something dramatic has happened. “Shakespearean” used to mean a situation of extreme emotions in high politics mixed in with a measure of the unfathomability of fate. Now it is shorthand for any situation in which somebody becomes powerful and/or loses power. The whole range of Shakespearean terms has been debased. “Lady Macbeth” is shorthand for any ambitious woman. “Othello” is shorthand for anyone jealous. “Hamlet” is shorthand for anyone who overthinks. The time has come either to use these terms far more selectively or to retire them altogether.

Marche was the first to say it like an English teacher, but he is not in fact the first to say it at all. Dean Barnett at the Weekly Standard beat him to the “you’re no Shakespeare” punch by more than two weeks:

“Shakespearean” suggests a certain nobility of character that eventually lost out to the tragic figure’s flaws. Pardon me for playing Mickey the Dunce, but where, pray tell, was Eliot Spitzer’s nobility? As a prosecutor, he was a bully. As a husband and a father, he was a wretched failure who brought humiliation to his family while violating their trust in a serial manner.

And finally, when the gig was up and he could have earned a small measure of redemption by showing a little honor and dealing forthrightly with his shortcomings, what did he do? He refused to face the music. He didn’t answer press inquiries. He uttered some rank rubbish suggesting he had a disease. And he hid behind the wife that he had treated so poorly.

This is, of course, a slightly different gloss on what “Shakespearean” is supposed to mean. But where Barnett says “nobility,” Marche says “dignity.”

Of the 76 results at Google News for Spitzer + Shakespearean, they aren’t all responsible for the cheapening of “Shakespearean.” Then again, those who object also have somewhat different notions of what “Shakespearean” is supposed to mean. But I’m inclined to think they all have a point.

Make sense?

The speech was about race, but I don’t believe this is the real underlying problem in the Jeremiah Wright imbroglio. One aspect of the controversy is religion, but I don’t think this is it exactly, either. Rarther, the problem is a combination of race and religion, and it doesn’t take an expert pundit to recognize that’s a dangerous combination.

As I noted in a previous post, it would be a cruel irony if the upshot of Obama’s campaign was a widening of suspicions between blacks and whites. If so, this will happen by white voters having to confront a strain of Christian thought which they are currently unfamiliar with and may not like very much once they do. And whether this strain is a prevailing belief among blacks or not, even those who do not subscribe to it just may take the opposite position out of perceived racial solidarity.

Now, I don’t claim to know much about Black Theology, other than what Wikipedia tells me (not much). I also do not know how representative Wright’s views are of the wider black electorate, but Newsweek has demonstrated that Wright’s views are not a fringe minority among prominent African-American clergy.

That said, here is the quote from its most prominent scholar, James Cone, making the rounds of the blogosphere:

Black theology refuses to accept a God who is not identified totally with the goals of the black community. If God is not for us and against white people, then he is a murderer, and we had better kill him. The task of black theology is to kill Gods who do not belong to the black community … Black theology will accept only the love of God which participates in the destruction of the white enemy. What we need is the divine love as expressed in Black Power, which is the power of black people to destroy their oppressors here and now by any means at their disposal. Unless God is participating in this holy activity, we must reject his love.

This version of the quote originated in the Asia Times, and previously appeared only in in academic books. It stands to reason that this heretofore obscure quote is going to get more significant play. Note the screen capture below of recent popular keywords on Free Republic:

No doubt Obama supporters and Democrats generally would dismiss the Freepers as populating the “fever swamps” of the right. But they’d be unwise to ignore them — and already, pro-Clinton bloggers are starting to pick up on it.

Unfortunately for Obama, his speech was not about religion. The words “liberation” and “theology” do not appear in the text of his remarks.

Obama should have gotten out in front of Wright’s anti-American rants long before this week, but he apparently chose not to address them until he was forced to do so. Likewise, he should have used Tuesday’s speech to address Black Liberation Theology itself. Too late now.

Assuming Obama wins the Democratic nomination, and that is still the way to bet, the only question now is whether this will happen during the primary or the general.

First, consider the results of a Wall Street Journal/NBC poll conducted last week. The survey results indicate that since December the number of people who believe Obama is a Muslim jumped from 8% to 13%. That’s a 62% increase in only three months. How many “middle of the road” Americans received the “Obama is a Muslim” e-mail from friends and either read it or passed it to someone else? Now pretend your Obama and the “whisper” campaign is that you’re really a dirty terrorist in hiding. Anything that focuses the public attention on your twenty year membership is a Christian church may be a very, very good thing.

Whether this is correct or not, I suppose we’ll find out in a few weeks. However, I’m skeptical that it’s much of a victory to replace the incorrect impression that Obama is a Muslim with the correct impression that his closest spiritual adviser has a fierce anti-American streak.

Consider the Romney campaign’s unsuccessful attempt to win over evangelical voters. After all, Mike Huckabee all but swept the Southern Republican primaries where their votes figured prominently. Romney could probably tell you that simply believing in God and Jesus Christ isn’t always enough.

Which leaves me with this question: Could “black liberation theology,” to which which the Rev. Jeremiah Wright and Chicago’s Trinity church adhere, become the focus of whispers and speculation and suspicion? I think it’s quite plausible, and I find the prospect fairly troubling. It would surely be ironic if the Obama campaign produced a wider rift between black and white Americans.

Obama’s slowness to deal with the Wright time bomb, and muddled initial response, is somewhat like Kerry’s inept response to the Swift Boaters’ allegations. With his speech today, going on over my shoulder in the background, however, he’s trying to address it head on. This suggests Obama recognizes how divisive Wright’s rhetoric and his own apparent tolerance thereof can be, to his own campaign at the very least.

I’m agnostic, so to speak, about Obama’s campaign in general. (Not so much in the general.) But in this task I hope he succeeds.

*** Goin’ negative: We were about to write this morning about our surprise that Clinton hasn’t run a negative ad against Obama in either Ohio or Texas. But then we saw the new Clinton ad in Texas that appeared on TODAY. It goes: “It’s 3am and your children are safe and asleep. But there’s a phone in the White House and it’s ringing. Something’s happening in the world. Your vote will decide who answers that call. Whether it’s someone who already knows the world’s leaders…knows the military…someone tested and ready to lead in a dangerous world. It’s 3am and your children are safe and asleep. Who do you want answering the phone?” Does it remind anyone of that LBJ Daisy ad? Ok, that’s a little extreme… But it sure does raise the specter of fear.

It’s also being compared to the “red phone” ad Mondale put up against the insurgent Gary Hart in 1984.

But it actually reminded me of something else entirely, and much more recent: a campaign mailer put out by AFSCME in support of Clinton in New Hampshire not two months ago. Politico’s Ben Smith was the first to post it; here it is, cropped for clarity/focus:

You could say AFSCME tested the message in a small market before the campaign took it wider. Nothing wrong with that unless it was actually an AFSCME-backed 527, which the campaign would be forbidden from coordinating with. Then again, lifting an argument two months later is hardly a smoking gun.

As to its potency, the AFSCME mailer received a bit of negative coverage in the blogsosphere, but not enough to backfire. This time the stakes are even higher, and the campaign itself is making the risky argument.

If it works, it will no doubt join the ranks of those controversial-but-effective spots (add Reagan’s “Bear in the woods” and 43’s “Wolves” ads in there, too). If it doesn’t, as I expect, it will be quickly forgotten and everyone can get on with blaming Mark Penn for everything.

…bears unmistakable similarities to this recent clip by NBC’s Andrea Mitchell…

…from a week ago Tuesday night. Which leads me to ask… well, nothing really. However, when it comes to the charges against Barack Obama, I am inclined to agree with James Taranto of the Wall Street Journal. As he wrote yesterday,

isn’t it a bit heavy-handed to accuse Obama of plagiarism? This is a serious charge in academia and journalism, professions in which words are the final product. By contrast, language is a mere instrument for politicians. They hire speechwriters to put words in their mouths, something that would also be frowned upon in academia and journalism. Are voters really going to be dissuaded from backing Obama because as a politician he failed to adhere to the ethical standards that would have applied if he were a professor or a reporter? Not likely.

P.S. It’s fair to note, it isn’t Dickerson I am elbowing here — it’s Slate headline writers, who are notorious more for being misleading than for being copycats.

P.P.S. For what it’s worth, I see Crooks and Liars commenter lokmon beat me to the punch.