Les Otten Plagiarizes AGAIN

Trial bumper sticker:

OTTEN!
Wealthy enough not to have to do his own thinking

Wow. Hard to believe no one on his campaign staff knew enough to at least paraphrase Bowen's work cleverly enough to avoid detection. Really, really stupid! Gagnon, thanks for posting this.

Meh.

Does anyone actually think that Otten himself filled out the questionnaire? That kind of stuff gets done by a campaign's communications team, not by the candidates.

It would be fair to criticize Otten for having people on board who'd pull a boneheaded move like this - and fair to criticize him if he doesn't apologize and take corrective action - up to and including firing the staffer who did such sloppy work. But to accuse him of plagiarism is completely over the top.

Any kind of policy communications like this - even as small a scale as a blog - typically get approved by the candidate, because it speaks in his voice. I am quite certain he didn't fill it out personally himself, but I have little doubt that he probably signed off on it, and I can't for the life of me imagine he was unaware this was a rip of something like this.

It is also at least the third time the Otten/his campaign has done something like this.

Brushing it off as a campaign worker stealing it is missing the point. Even if true, this campaign has demonstrated a repeated tendency to do this, and his willingness to go along with it, or shoddy supervision, are signs of an unethical, or incompetent man at the top. Either one is really really worrisome.

Nice catch Mr. Gagnon. Good week for you.

GW

I have done the first draft of answers to such policy questions for 3 different campaigns. The drafts were always reviewed and edited by the candidates and others in the campaign before they were sent in.

I had thought the Otten campaign had put its early mistakes behind it, but I guess not.

Precisely Dan. When I have done things like this for PTP, I've had Communications Directors tweeking their answers for weeks at a time, running them by candidates, getting feedback, tweeking message, etc. You see how they all operate from this side of things. Interestingly, since I also work FOR campaigns, I see THAT side of it too, and trust me, Dan is right - answers like this, no matter how insignificant the location they are being sent to are, are treated as official candidate communications in the candidate's voice, and are absolutely run through them.

He very clearly doesn't care in the least about treating policy seriously, and he has no compunction with taking other people's hard work and passing it off as his own. If he was somehow unaware of it, that is pretty much just as disturbing, because it means he is a horrible horrible manager. Then again, looking at his business record, that wouldn't shock me.

No matter what, it shows us something extremely undesirable about Otten. The other candidates really do need to knee cap him - he is spending 1.3 million dollars defining himself, and no one is cutting him down to size.

Trial bumper sticker:

OTTEN!
Wealthy enough not to have to do his own thinking

Funniest thing I've read all day.

Just who does he think he is---- Joe BIDEN??

deleted

Matt Gagnon and Dan Billings are both correct. On any campaign I've worked, things like this go back-and-forth with the candidate and nothing is sent out without the candidate's sign-off. For it to be done repeatedly also makes one wonder what kind of people he would put on staff were he to be in office and how much attention to detail he, as CEO, would pay to what went out in his name. Not a pretty thought.

BTW: I think Matt and Dan would agree that no matter how brilliant we think our drafts are, it is the candidate who has final say and we live with that or disassociate from the campaign. So the onus is always on the candidate.

I think in this case the candidate actually advocates copying good ideas and passing them off as his. I have a video of him somewhere where he actually says something to that effect. I'll go dig it up.

Wow- first the Obama website plagiarism, then the Colorado ski resort plagiarism, now this?
Les Otten- serial plagiarist. This guy is an empty suit with zero integrity.

This should be the end of the Otten candidacy. Any Republican that supports this creep at this point should be ashamed.

Date: Fri, 30 Apr 2010 21:55:13 -0400
Subject: Correction to Otten statement on education to Augusta Insider
From: Edith Smith

Dear Augusta Insider:

In one of our responses to the Augusta Insider's recent questions regarding education, specifically the Race To The Top program, part of the answer came from public testimony from the Maine Heritage Policy Center on LD 1801. We should have attributed this quote directly to Steve Bowen of the Maine Heritage Policy Center.

The correct citation should be listed as coming from testimony regarding L.D.'s 1799, 1800 and 1801, The Maine Heritage Policy Center http://www.mainepolicy.org/resources/media/237_1507417858.pdf

Les and members of the Otten campaign staff previously met with the Maine Heritage Policy Center and Steve Bowen, who pointed us toward this public testimony. We have spoken to the Maine Heritage Policy Center executive director Tarren Bragdon who appreciates the fact that we have gone back and attributed that quote to their organization. We apologize for the inadvertent oversight as the final draft of our response was being prepared. This is an error of omission not an error of commission.

We will continue to seek out the best minds in the state such as the Maine Heritage Policy Center on the issues that face us.

Thank you very much.

--
Edie
Edith A. Smith
Campaign Manager
Les Otten for Governor
Jobs for Maine Campaign

"Attributed this quote"? What quote? The one that they reformatted as bullet points?

PART of the answer? Are you @#%#@%@# kidding me? This response is infuriating. He did not run this by Maine Heritage first, he didn't use Stephen's testimony for PART of his answer.

He lifted somebody elses hard work, passed it off as his own, got busted, and is now trying to paint an inaccurate picture of how it all happened as a shield to protect himself. Absolutely infuriating, and if I wasn't anti-Otten prior to this nonsensical release, I sure as hell am now.

Now that is some spin if I ever saw it. Somehow the quotation marks and citation were inadvertently removed from the final draft of the response? Yeah right.

But I guess he couldn't just respond by saying, "I have no clue what the Race to the Top program is so I'm just gonna go with what the Maine Heritage Policy Center said." He probably should have. That at least would have looked a little more credible. Read Mr. Bowen's testimony and then Candidate Otten's answer. This was no mistake.

I'm kinda surprised how amateurish Edith's response is. I've been told she's better than this. She obviously doesn't understand the scope of the problem. The plagiarism doesn't end at the segments quoted on PTP. You need to look at Les' complete answer (http://augustainsider.us/gopedq2/) and Bowen's complete testimony (http://www.mainepolicy.org/resources/media/237_1507417858.pdf ) to get a feel for how much was directly copied. When you compare these two sources and then go back and read Edith's response it's very obvious she doesn't understand what really happened or she's just not very good at telling the truth.

Got to give credit to the campaign for the depth of their - um - bowels in offering that response.

Does anyone know which candidate Stephen Bowen is supporting in the primary? If it's Otten, which I doubt it is, than he could couch the blow by saying something that would indicate that he did not feel his work was copied without appropriate consent (in the eyes of Stephen Bowen). Even if he was supporting Otten prior to this, however, he might not be anymore. If Bowen is not supporting Otten, it probably wouldn't pay much for him to express outrage but let someone like MHPC head Tarren Bragdon (assuming he also isn't supporting Les Otten) be the closest to the "victim" responder to Otten's plagarism.

My response can be found here.

Since it seems to be the thing to do these days, I'll share a couple snippets from my own post:

The idea that they intended to cite my work but neglected, mistakenly, to actually do it is laughable. When you as an author intend to cite the work of another, you quote the cited work exactly as it appears. You don't deconstruct paragraphs and rework them into bullet lists, and you don't rewrite sentences your own way, then slap quotes around them. In fact, if you intend to quote another's work, you actually use quotation marks.

Had the Otten piece simply been comprised of big sections of unedited text from my work, they could plausibly argue that they cut and pasted it into a new document with the intent of later adding quotation marks and citations. But what they did was rewrite and reorganize whole sections of it. You don't accidentally turn a paragraph into a bullet list, take out the bullets with which you disagree, then accidentally forget to cite the author of the original paragraph from which the bullet list was crafted.

Are they joking with this?

Additionally, a couple of us from MHPC did indeed meet with the Otten campaign in Bethel on March 23rd. We have met with most of the gubernatorial candidates at one time or another, and not just the Republicans. It is also likely that we did give them some of our reports, and we may very well have given them a copy of the legislative testimony from which they borrowed so brazenly. We have provided materials to a number of gubernatorial candidates, and are more than happy to provide them - any of them - with any information or materials that we might have. We are a research and educational organization and not a day goes by that we don't send someone - a taxpayer, a college student, a legislative candidate, a school board member - a report or a paper that we've authored. This is what we do for a living.

What we did not do was give the Otten campaign some kind of green light to steal our work and pass it off as their own, which is what is suggested in the campaign's response. We spend a lot of time and money "pointing" people toward our work, and we don't do it so that they can then rewrite it and pass it off as their own thinking.

This is no small matter for us. Our donors and supporters trust that the work we do is intended to advance our mission of developing and promoting limited-government, free-market public policy solutions that benefit the people of Maine. We do not intend for our work to be used in a way that implies we endorse a specific political candidate, nor do we expect candidates to slyly suggest in their statements that we are somehow working behind the scenes to advance their campaigns. That appears to me to be what the Otten campaign is implying and it is both offensive to me and to the organization and potentially damaging to our credibility.

The Otten campaign has taken steps to apologize to me and to MHPC, but not for stealing our work. In their mind, it seems, this was simply an unfortunate accident, not a blatant attempt to pass off my work as the work of Les Otten.

I, for one, am not buying it.

I recently relied heavily on one of Steve's reports for a column I did on bonds. I gave MHPC credit for the information that Steve compilied but also put things in my own words.

If the print and tv media don't jump all over this we have a serious problem.

Matt and Derek - you both deserve the traffic surge. I hope people keep reading and keep learning. Maybe then we can demand specific answers from candidates not their handlers.

This question should be asked of the candidate at every opportunity.

Otten responds to charges that he plagiarized answer to survey

BY MEREDITH GOAD

Maine Sunday Telegram

A Republican gubernatorial candidate issued a statement Saturday answering charges that his campaign plagiarized an answer to a political website's questionnaire on education policy.

But Les Otten's initial mea culpa, posted on the website Augusta Insider -- augustainsider.us/ -- didn't sit well with Stephen Bowen of the Maine Heritage Policy Center, whose work Otten is accused of calling his own.

Full Story

An embarrassingly superficial article. Completely lets him off the hook, makes zero mention of the ADDITIONAL plagiarism in his jobs plan, nor does it mention the scrubbing and editing his staff is doing to cover up their plagiarism.

And, most offensively to me, doesn't say one word about who blew open the story.

They wonder why their industry is dying. Utterly pathetic.

Matt,

I agree completely. I've been out of Maine for the past week, and Googled "Les Otten plagiarism" without the quotes to see what type of media coverage it was getting in Maine. PTP, Augusta Insider, Maine Politics all came up -- and that pathetic piece from The Morning Sentinel.

As an aside, some musings:
Just when our state needs more in our candidates, we are offered Les.
Les Otten should plagiarize Less Often.
Les is never more.

*I have heard the first and third joke used by various people, but none that I can give specific credit to. The second one is entirely my dry humor.

I rejected Otten the day his campaign revealed his Obama-ripoff logo.

I wonder if you looked at position papers by Dems how often you'd find stuff lifted from Kit. St. John's group or CAP or progressive states network, etc.

I remember a few years ago I wrote a LTE (published in a weekly) suggesting municipalities and school districts could save money on benefits if the legislature would adopt some free market health insurance reforms. Funny, a state legislator wrote something to that effect shortly thereafter, with large chunks word for word from my letter without citation. I was flattered but would like to have been asked.

The contributions to Democrats did Otten in for me. To say nothing about driving American Ski Company into bankruptcy, but walking away with millions. Has anyone figured out how he pulled that off?

Just to clarify something, ASC never went bankrupt. There was no bankruptcy filing. Les made a series of ridiculously stupid financing deals to the tune of $200+ million at high interest rates in the form of senior secured notes. When it became clear that Les was running the company into the ground the Wall St. vultures that provided the financing had Les removed from the company and commenced selling off all of the company's assets to recoup their funds. The company was dissolved.

I'd highly recommend reading through ASC's SEC filings at http://www.sec.gov/cgi-bin/browse-edgar?action=getcompany&CIK=0001019293... and http://www.sec.gov/cgi-bin/browse-edgar?action=getcompany&CIK=0001019293... It's all there. It shows the pattern of grossly over extending the company. A few of the most interesting documents are the ones that detail how Les personally defaulted on an $18M loan with ING to purchase ASC stock options for himself. Yes, he granted himself stock options in his company, borrowed $18M to exercise those options and then defaulted on the loan. It gets really interesting when Oak Hill Capital Partners steps in. That was the beginning of the end for ASC.