A White House official who serves as President Bush's liaison to the religious community has been caught plagiarizing a column that he writes for an Indiana newspaper. Tim Goeglein, deputy director of the White House Office of Public Liaison, admitted that portions of a column he wrote today for the Fort Wayne News-Sentinel were copied from an article written several years ago by Jeffrey Hart in the Dartmouth Review.
"It is true," Goeglein told Fort Wayne's Journal Gazette newspaper in an e-mail. "I am entirely at fault. It was wrong of me. There are no excuses."
Other columns by Goeglein also have contained plagiarized passages, News-Sentinel Editor Kerry Hubartt announced. "Goeglein has admitted that portions of the column were used from another source without attribution. We have found material in at least two other previous guest columns lifted from other sources without attribution and are continuing to check other previous submissions."
Goeglein's plagiarism was revealed this morning by blogger Nancy Nall, who identified close similarities in numerous paragraphs of Goeglein's commentary about college education to Hart's Dartmouth piece.
"Tim Goeglein ... is a plagiarist," announced Nall. "Not an accidental or delicate one, either."
Compare these passages in Goeglein's column to Hart's original:
Hart: It can scarcely be challenged that the United States is part of the narrative of European history.
Goeglein: It can hardly be challenged that the United States of America is part of the narrative of European history.
Hart: Our language, legal tradition, political arrangements derive, and demonstrably so, from England.
Goeglein: Our language, literature, legal tradition, political arrangements derive, demonstrably, from England.
Goeglein, a former TV news producer and communications director for Sen. Dan Coats (R-Ind.), is a graduate of the Ernie Pyle School of Journalism at Indiana University.
A 2004 New York Times profile described Goeglein as then-Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove's "legman on the right," a liaison between Christian conservatives and the administration.
"He listens well and he is able to synthesize what he hears, so he is a good guy for getting a lay of the land and hearing what people are saying," Rove told the Times. "For a movement that tends to be a little fractious at times, this is a guy who crosses all kinds of lines."
Nall, the blogger who caught Goeglein, is a former journalist at the News-Sentinel who has written about him before. "I've had a lot of fun at Tim Goeglein’s expense over the last few months," she writes. "In his columns for The News-Sentinel, my old newspaper, he personifies a certain sort of apple-cheeked Hoosier drippiness, which undoubtedly masks a core of white-hot ambition."
