Neil Kinnock
The Other Kinnock Lesson: Sold-Out Stadium Speeches Aren't Always a Good Thing
DENVER—Joe Biden spoke, and it was a success. But the ghost of a balding Welshman could yet come to haunt the Democratic convention.
Neil Kinnock, the former leader of the British Labor Party, is best known in American circles as the man from whom Biden borrowed some rhetoric during his abortive bid for the presidency in 1988. Back then, Biden got caught adapting comments Kinnock had made about being the first member of his family to go to college. Although the Delaware senator had credited the British pol for the ideas in previous speeches, one occasion on which he did not do so proved disastrous for his White House hopes, leaving him open to the accusation of plagiarism. read more »
Could Biden be the Big Loser in Solzhenitsyn-gate?
O.K., so this may prove to be one of those flare-ups that’s extinguished and forgotten before anyone really notices, but there’s plenty of chatter in the blogosphere today about the striking similarities between the moving personal anecdote from his Vietnamese captivity that John McCain recounted at Saturday’s Saddleback forum and one that the late Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn told from his gulag days.
Here’s what McCain said on Saturday night, to a question about what his faith in Christ means to him personally:
It was Christmas Day. We were allowed to stand outside of our cell for a few minutes, and those days we were not allowed to see or communicate with each other, although we certainly did.
