"It's completely mischaracterized to call it plagiarism, because the source of it is the source from the other plans as well... It is the original work of Eric Schnurer."

"One of the things I learned when I was at Trek bicycle was, the way you're always going to be better is to go out and understand what other people are doing, what other companies are doing.... Why reinvent the wheel if things are working elsewhere, if people have proposed good ideas, why would I not want to use those? Certainly there's nothing in here that I don't think works and is right for Wisconsin... And so this is much ado about nothing here, because that's actually how good plans should be put together."

Said Mary Burke, addressing the lifted blocks of text that appear in what USA Today calls her "glossy, 38-page color booklet, which she pulled from her bag during the interview."

"This is my jobs plan," she said, apparently proud of the document or needing to pretend to be proud of it. Is it too late now to generate a new document? Is the document that important? If it's important, we need to believe that it is her document and that it represents her capacity and competence as an executive.

To pull a glossy booklet out of your bag and declare "This is my jobs plan" and "It is the original work of Eric Schnurer" seems comical. Obviously, we all know that candidates have people ghostwriting for them, but you use them to write words that you can present as your own, and it doesn't work to have to say I didn't steal the words of those 3 other gubernatorial candidates because the truth is that all 4 of us are only repeating the words of Eric Schnurer.

Burke is forced to argue that the glossy booklet still counts as her jobs plan, and the argument is that the ideas are good. They were, she seems to assert, filtered through her executive judgment and deemed worthy. She has gone out and understood what other people are doing, she has listened to other people's ideas and determined which are good ideas and she has selected what is right for Wisconsin. But how do we know that? The text looks like a slapdash patchwork, with cut-and-pasted text used in 4 different states without any variation or attention to honing even the form of expression.

That makes it quite hard to believe that there has been a careful sifting and winnowing — as we say in Wisconsin. Of course, that is something that could happen, but why would we think that it did... rather than suspecting that we're getting conned by someone who's stuck with bad facts and making the best of it?