David Axelrod Plagiarizes Himself

Barack Obama today in a speech in Denver, Barack Obama echoed a line from the 1996 Bill Clinton campaign (my emphasis):

With Caroline Kennedy at his side, making her debut on the campaign trail, Mr. Obama urged Democrats taking part in next week’s Colorado caucuses to fight temptation “to simply turn back the clock and to build a bridge back to the 20th century.”

While some (or rather, most) will look at this as another attack on Clinton, I’m more interested in the symbolism. It turns out that phrase when used by the Clintons was written by one David Axelrod, now chief stragist for Obama:

From some advisory work he did for Bill Clinton during the 1996 campaign, when he wrote the memo that introduced the phrase “Bridge to the 21st century” into the political vernacular, Axelrod learned that for a Democrat the future always trumps the past. He says he also learned from Clinton that a pol’s biggest task is “to narrow the distance between the people and government.”

It’s surely an interesting use of the phrase, if nothing else. Between this and making it about bring right on Day 1 instead of ready, Obama seems to have moved into a phase of throwing Clinton’s words (and Bill Clinton’s words apparently) back at them.

[Photo Credit: Flickr user justinhamilton.org under a Creative Commons license]