Jake Tapper moves the ball a yard or two down the field on the controversy surrounding Barack Obama's unattributed use of Deval Patrick's words:

So....the claim that Patrick an Obama "first" discussed this last Summer does not make sense.

It should also be noted that in addition to the "Yes We Can" slogan that Obama used in 2004, Patrick used in 2006, and Obama uses today, other language from the two clients of political guru David Axelrod has come from both men's mouths.

To wit:

Patrick in June 2006, at the Massachusetts Democratic party convention: "I am not asking anybody to take a chance on me. I am asking you to take a chance on your own aspirations."

Obama one year later, as quoted in USA Today: "I am not asking anyone to take a chance on me. I am asking you to take a chance on your own aspirations."

Just words?

I know a lot of people think the Clinton campaign's accusations of plagiarism are much ado about nothing. I happen to agree with Byron York, who wrote yesterday:

I think the plagiarism charge against Obama has some merit. Is it OK to lift material from someone else and then, when it is noticed, explain it by saying that there's no problem, that the guy who wrote this said I could use it? Yes, the Clinton team is looking for anything it can grasp these days, but just because they want to use it politically doesn't mean that it is nothing.

Maybe part of the reason I feel the charge rings true is because I was in the room listening to Obama's speech on Saturday night in Milwaukee. And that section of his speech was so good that I singled out those exact words from his text because they offered such an effective demolition of Hillary Clinton's argument, delivered just minutes earlier in the same hall.

I certainly wasn't aware until later that Obama was using a formulation constructed by someone else as his weapon of choice against Clinton.

Turn the example in on itself: Would it matter if a day or two after Martin Luther King Jr. gave his famous speech on the Washington Mall we learned that he had lifted the phrase "I have a dream" off of a friend who had used it publicly two years earlier? While it wouldn't change the merit of his argument, I think it would take away from its authenticity.

And so in that sense, I think the charge against Obama does have some merit and does matter, though I recognize others see it differently.