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On 18 July 2016 Melania Trump gave a rousing speech at the Republican National Convention (RNC), well-received for a few moments before journalists and viewers began comparing its content to a 2008 Democratic National Convention (DNC) speech given by First Lady Michelle Obama: Controversy predictably raged thereafter on social media, where parodies and joke memes mocked Mrs. Trump's ostensible misstep. A number of creative defenses were proffered for the similarities, including one from Gov. Chris Christie stating that only 7% of Melania's speech was identical to Mrs. Obama's: Another deflecting claim held that the speech given by Michelle Obama at the 2008 DNC was itself not entirely unique. According to Breitbart, Mrs. Obama lifted her speech from Saul Alinsky's book Rules for Radicals: The plagiarism referenced by Breitbart amounted to two turns of phrase that Alinsky and Mrs. Obama both incorporated into a single sentence but used in different ways. Alinsky wrote: By contrast, Mrs. Obama spoke in her 2008 speech of becoming more closely acquainted with a young Barack Obama and his desire to work toward the world as it should be rather than accept the world as it is: A simplistic comparison of Alinksy and Mrs. Obama's uses of the world as it is and the world as it should be (phrases that were arguably exceedingly common in concept for policy speeches) suggested a surface likeness. But Alinsky's purportedly plagiarized half-sentence was part of a passage about adopting a realistic approach to the world as it is versus the world as it should be. By contrast, Michelle Obama was paraphrasing her husband's lamenting acceptance of the world as it is when the world as it should be ... reflect[ed] our values and aspirations and was not expressing it as her own thought. As such, the plagiarism claim applied to Mrs. Obama was weak on its face, given that it involved a mere eight common words supposedly lifted from the oft-invoked Alinsky and expressed a notion opposite to the one offered by Alinsky.
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