Joe Biden has spent much of his invisible primary season—the time between when candidacies are declared and people actually go to the polls, the time when money given seems to matter more than votes cast—avoiding policy details. Avoiding, for that matter, much policy altogether. In its place, the Biden campaign appeared to make a bet that the former senator and vice president could win the Democratic presidential nomination on a combination of his “Uncle Joe” persona and a nostalgia for the bygone days of the Obama administration. But in a “change election” cycle, where one candidate has made having “a plan” a virtual campaign slogan, no presidential candidate, it seems, can avoid policy altogether. So, last Tuesday, Biden released his proposals for fighting climate change—one of the most pressing issues for the planet, and, importantly for the candidate, one of the most motivating issues for Democratic voters.

But Biden’s plan, people quickly realized, had one big problem: It wasn’t really his plan at all. Instead, it contained a number of passages lifted from the websites of various climate advocacy organizations. The incident recalled the plagiarism scandal that ultimately doomed Biden’s first presidential campaign in 1988, when he was found to have lifted portions of a speech from Neil Kinnock, who, at the time, was the leader of Great Britain’s Labour Party.



But was this year’s text appropriation a plagiarism scandal? Less than 24 hours after Biden was found to have used language from climate organizations, Politico was reporting that just about every Democratic presidential candidate—including senators Bernie Sanders, Kamala Harris, and Cory Booker, and former Texas Representative Beto O’Rourke—was using language from other organizations on their campaign websites. Asked for comment, the Harris campaign offered the same explanation that Biden’s did. “These are statistics,” Harris spokesperson Ian Sams said.



This is, moreover, apparently common practice among campaigns. “While any journalist would be mad about getting plagiarized by another journalist, policy shops and advocacy groups are happy to have their stuff copied by a leading presidential candidate,” Vox’s Matt Yglesias wrote. In other words, it’s not a scandal, as Yglesias sees it, for campaigns to lean on experts when formulating policy. It’s sensible for nonexperts to lean on experts.



But this does point to another issue; potentially a problematic one. For all the policy work that Democratic candidates have put out, much of it is strikingly similar. With the first Democratic presidential debate fast approaching, it appears increasingly likely that candidates will spend their time on stage arguing about small differences in their emerging platforms. But this fixation on tiny policy details could overlook the two biggest issues facing Democrats: the need for a big, organizing message, and the need for a strategy to actually implement their policies. Without these, the websites full of proposals won’t be worth any more than the paper they’re not printed on.

