Kamala Harris’s ‘Plagiarism Scandal’ Isn’t Her Fault. Why Can’t the New York Times Just Admit the Issue?

A brief afternoon note here, since I’ve otherwise been busy on the missing-Democratic-male-voter beat elsewhere at National Review: Institutional hell-raiser Christopher Rufo — last seen participating in the investigative hilarity that got Claudine Gay cashiered from the presidency of Harvard University (for a career of serial plagiarism and a craven unwillingness to denounce campus antisemitism, but mostly the career of serial plagiarism) — is back again to inform us that Kamala Harris is the biggest plagiarist of them all. And while the story is less than it seems (and, in fact, not terribly interesting in my opinion; nothing like the dynamite that Aaron Sibarium dug up about Gay’s lifetime of academic dishonesty over at the Free Beacon last winter), the New York Times’ mindlessly defensive turtle-shell reaction to it is at least comically revealing.

In 2009, a district attorney and Willie Brown protégé from San Francisco named Kamala Harris “wrote” a book, Smart on Crime, as part of her preparations for her 2010 bid for state attorney general. You remember it, right? Aside from its remarkable smartness about crime, it was also a literary work of such surpassing majesty and grace that it not only immediately rocked the firmament of English letters but also became part of the syllabi for an entire generation of children, next to King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.” Or perhaps I misremember and it was just another boring campaign book, churned out to give Harris name recognition in advance of a statewide campaign. (Harris, hilariously, only won that race — in California in 2010, mind you — by a miserable 0.8 percent, a historical factoid I’ll happily plop on the table for my progressive readers to ponder in silence.)

Well, apparently, several sections of Smart on Crime turn out to be have been plagiarized from Wikipedia, which doesn’t seem terribly smart to me at all. The matter is not really up for dispute: Rufo has the goods this time on what is clearly a series of near-verbatim lifts. So it’s tempting to default to plagiarism jokes for the remainder of this Corner hit and call it a day’s work. (After all, we are talking about a woman who was selected for her present job by a man who was bounced from an earlier attempt at his current job for plagiarizing another man’s life story in his stump speeches, like Steve Martin declaring himself the son of poor black sharecroppers.)

But let’s not kid ourselves, here: The fault lies with Harris’s ghostwriter, not with Harris herself, not this time. All politicians use ghostwriters to draft their useless (and almost always unread) campaign biographies, and this is universally acknowledged, however much people want to feign outrage about it now. (J. D. Vance wrote Hillbilly Elegy all on his own, but you must remember that Vance was an author long before he became a politician.)

And in all honesty, who can blame them? Politicians in 21st-century America do not succeed because of their ability to write; they win on the nature of their camera-ready affect, stage presence, and fortuitous embodiment of the zeitgeist. Books like these are meant as signifiers of a candidate’s “seriousness” — a simulacrum of substance, not substance itself, and nothing worth reading. Seemingly every candidate for higher office has at least one of them, and almost none of them matter. (South Dakota governor Kristi Noem has already published two, but, given how the last one went, I doubt we’ll see a third. See, that’s one that actually ended up mattering, albeit not in the way Noem had hoped.)

What makes me chuckle, then, is the reflexive defensiveness of the Times coverage, which Rufo rightly takes issue with. In their piece, the reporters go to great — and arguably deceptive — lengths to downplay the extent of the plagiarism, minimizing the degree to which the author has clearly copied and pasted. But they shouldn’t have a problem conceding these things. Harris didn’t write the book, and nobody reasonably thinks that she did! Politicians use ghostwriters. It is a polite fiction we all indulge when we pretend otherwise, and it’s not even remotely scandalous to simply acknowledge it as a rather dull and ordinary aspect of the carnival of political public relations. Why can’t the Times simply grant that obvious point, and say that the sins lie with an unrelated third party, instead of mulishly refusing to even grant the reality of the plagiarism? Either they are too unsophisticated to disentangle Harris’s ghostwriter from Harris’s urgent electoral cause, or they think their readers aren’t up to the task of doing that themselves.

I suppose it’s NR contributing editor Dan Foster who best summarized the real vulnerability for Harris in this kerfuffle: Offering “all politicians use ghostwriters” as a defense “feels a wee bit dissonant when you’re running on competence and also don’t know how to talk.” But that’s a rather attenuated connection, especially when (to be blunt) Harris has so many other, greater problems holding her leaky coalition together that she needs to worry about.