Rainville fires staffer after bloggers highlight plagiarism

By Shay Totten | Vermont Guardian

Posted October 3, 2006

WESTMINSTER — In less than 24 hours, an item posted on a rarely visited blog ended up embarrassing a congressional candidate and led to the firing of a top campaign aide.

The chain of events began this past weekend when a Community College of Vermont professor, Julie Waters of Westminster, intrigued by something she read on a popular blog — Green Mountain Daily — decided to see if the statements of Republican Martha Rainville were her own, or were plagiarized from other politicians.

What Waters found and then posted on her own blog Sunday — Reason and Brimstone — unleashed a firestorm in the Vermont blogosphere Monday.

By the day’s end, a top Rainville campaign aide — Chris Stewart — was fired and Rainville’s campaign website was disabled while staffers combed the site to determine how many passages were potentially plagiarized. As of Tuesday morning, the site remained disabled.

“We are currently performing a thorough review of public campaign documents. This is an isolated incident,” said Brendan McKenna, Rainville’s spokesman.

McKenna said when Rainville was made aware of the situation, she said that Stewart had to go. When confronted with the findings, Stewart offered a letter of resignation.

The campaign was also preparing a letter to send to Waters thanking her for bringing the issue to their attention.

Waters said she didn’t set out to be the heroine of a political drama, just do what she does to her own students’ work — check it for accuracy and plagiarism.

What Waters found surprised her.

In one instance, she found that Rainville cited as her own words a statement on U.S. energy policy that appears to have originated from Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-NY.

Waters also found a Rainville statement on the need for transparency in federal budgeting that she believes originated with Rep. Jim Cooper, D-TN, and was copied from a transcript of the public television program NOW, which aired on Aug. 25. The Rainville statement appeared on her campaign website Sept. 8.

This latter post is what really got Waters’ attention as a teacher.

“Here's the best part about this: notice the grammatical error in Cooper's original comment: "There should be no secrets unless it involves certain parts of national security." (the noun is singular but the verb is plural),” writes Waters on her blog. “Rainville's statement makes that exact same grammatical error — it's not just a rendering of the same idea. It's cut and pasted from the statement (sic) by Cooper.”

Waters, who said she normally works for causes rather than candidates, said her main motivation to keep digging came from her professional passion as a teacher.

“I work hard to teach my students what is and is not honest from an academic perspective, and I'm flabbergasted that Rainville's own campaign clearly does not understand the difference,” Waters said.

She finds that her students don’t often understand the difference between citing authors and plagiarizing them, so she is constantly vigilant.

For Waters, what she found only raises more questions in her mind about Rainville’s authenticity as a candidate.

“To me, however, this calls into question a great many of her public statements: What are her own ideas and which ones are the things that just sound like good sound bites? What's her true perspective and what is something testmarketed to appeal to Vermont voters?” said Waters.

Stewart’s role at the Rainville campaign was multi-faceted. He was a regular attendee of her Democratic rival’s press conferences and a researcher.

He had also worked for another GOP campaign this year before coming to Rainville.

Stewart had worked on Republican Rich Tarrant’s campaign as a field rep for three southern Vermont counties, but was let go from that campaign for unspecified reasons.

“It is a confidential matter between Mr. Stewart and the campaign,” said Tim Lennon, Tarrant’s campaign spokesman.

McKenna said the campaign knew that Stewart had “parted ways with the Tarrant Campaign,” but didn’t say if the campaign inquired about the reasons.

This is not the first time that a subordinate hire at the Rainville campaign has caused a stir.

Earlier this year, the Guardian learned that Cpl. Dan DiPietro, a Vermont National Guardsman and military employee, had been hired by Rainville’s campaign to design her website, campaign logo and other material. This hire came at a time when Rainville was still DiPietro’s commanding officer, despite rules that prohibit such interactions.

At the time, Nathan Rice, Rainville’s campaign manager, said he had made the hire and that Rainville did not have a direct say in who was hired, or a direct role in overseeing DiPietro’s work.

Military rules prohibit commanding officers from entering into business deals with subordinates, but in this case Guard officials punished DiPietro. That’s because when the issue was brought to their attention, Guard officials found that DiPietro had posted examples of his web design work and photography he had done for the Guard on a personal website hawking his private design firm. Military rules prohibit using work-related products to advertise private services.

With the rapid way in which this went from obscure blog, to mainstream blog to the media, one blogger thinks this means Vermont’s blogosphere is officially on the map.

“Absolutely. And in all honesty, I didn't think we would see the blogs really impacting the races like this until next cycle, but the feedback I've received from the campaigns makes it clear that they've been watching,” said John Odum, one of the founder’s of Green Mountain Daily, and the person who filed a post that showed how some of Rainville’s own health care proposals came from a speech delivered by Pres. George Bush.

Waters said it was Odum’s post that got her thinking.

“I was looking for information on the polling for the house race and found a reference to a Green Mountain Daily post which suggested that Rainville's health care information was stolen from a Bush speech. I couldn't find the original Green Mountain Daily post, so I looked it up myself. That got me to find one instance of a copied material and I thought it was fairly odd, so I started investigating others,” Water said.

In that original blog post, Odum pointed out similarities in Bush’s State of the Union Speech to the bullet points of Rainville’s health care reform plan.

“The fact that our supposed "independent thinking" Republican candidate for the US House just obediently took her party-line dictates from the GOP leadership in Washington doesn't surprise me one whit. What surprises me is that her campaign seemed to make no effort whatsoever to hide this dutiful obedience,” wrote Odum in his blog diary.

“Don't they know we're gonna check this stuff?” he added.

Waters said after she checked our the sources and posted her findings, she contacted several media outlets about it, including Peter Freyne of Seven Days, who first posted it on his blog this morning, the Burlington Free Press and the Barre-Montpelier Times Argus. All three papers posted information about the incident on their blogs during the day.

WCAX-TV, the state’s largest TV station, did not air anything about the story during its 6 p.m. newscast.

“I'm not a blogger per se. I have a blog that I tried for a short while, and then I moved on to other projects. But that said, this was definitely spurred on by genuine bloggers and it clearly has had ome small influence in the campaign. Within 24 hours after my discovery and making it public, a statewide congressional race has taken down the main page on its website and a man's been fired,” said Waters.

Odum sees what happened as quintessential blogger moxie and an indication of things to come.

“This issue – which percolated through the blogs exclusively until it hit the boiling point - means this decentralized, people-powered medium has arrived and, quite frankly, from this point on, the Vermont political landscape will never be the same again,” Odum added.