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Gov: Senator in plagiarism row deserves respect

The Columbian
Published: July 24, 2014, 12:00am

HELENA, Mont. — Montana Gov. Steve Bullock said Thursday he had no knowledge that Democratic Sen. John Walsh had plagiarized his master’s thesis when he appointed the former lieutenant governor to the Senate in February.

Bullock joined national Democrats with a statement supporting Walsh, whose apparent plagiarism was first reported Wednesday by The New York Times. Walsh is now campaigning to keep the seat in November.

“Senator Walsh has a long history of fighting for Montanans, both at home and in combat,” Bullock said. “He deserves respect for his courage on our behalf.”

The revelation that Walsh’s 2007 U.S. Army War College thesis included a series of unattributed passages taken from the writings of other scholars is the second potentially damaging issue raised this year about the senator’s 33-year military career, which has been a cornerstone of his campaign.

Montana State University political science professor David Parker said the new allegations have the potential to seriously harm Walsh.

“It goes right to his strength — his military record and his integrity,” Parker said. “He was willing to take somebody’s words and make them his own. That’s a question of honor.”

But Democrats aren’t giving up on Walsh. A spokesman for the party’s Senate campaign committee said it is “100 percent behind Sen. Walsh” in his campaign against Republican Rep. Steve Daines.

Even before the plagiarism revelations, top Democratic strategists saw Walsh’s campaign as an uphill pull, never counting on it as key to holding their Senate majority.

Walsh dismissed the notion that the plagiarism allegations will affect his candidacy.

“I don’t really see it as having a negative impact on the campaign,” he told The Associated Press in a telephone interview Wednesday. “Montanans are really pleased with what I am accomplishing back here (in Washington).”

Walsh has a short window in which to figure out whether the allegations could be too toxic for him to win the Nov. 4 election. A candidate has until Aug. 11 to withdraw from this year’s contest, and the state party has until Aug. 20 to name a replacement candidate, Montana Secretary of State Linda McCulloch said Thursday.

If Walsh decides to drop out after the ballots are certified on Aug. 21, a new candidate can’t be appointed, and Walsh’s name will stay on the ballot, she said.

Walsh said that when he wrote the thesis, he had post-traumatic stress disorder from his service in Iraq, was on medication and was dealing with the stress of a fellow veteran’s recent suicide.

“I don’t want to blame my mistake on PTSD, but I do want to say it may have been a factor,” the senator said. “My head was not in a place very conducive to a classroom and an academic environment.”

He said he didn’t plagiarize but that his thesis contained “a few citations that were unintentionally left out.”

Walsh submitted his thesis, titled “The Case for Democracy as a Long Term National Strategy,” nearly two years after he returned from Iraq and about a year before he became Montana’s adjutant general overseeing the state’s National Guard and Department of Military Affairs.

The first page borrows heavily from a 2003 Foreign Affairs piece written by Thomas Carothers, vice president for studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and a 2009 book by Natan Sharansky with Ron Dermer, “The Case for Democracy: The Power of Freedom to Overcome Tyranny and Terror.”

Sharansky is a former Soviet dissident and chairman of the Jewish Agency for Israel. Dermer is the Israeli ambassador to the United States.

All six of the recommendations that Walsh listed at the end of his paper are taken nearly word-for-word without attribution from a Carnegie paper written by Carothers and three other scholars at the institute.

One section is nearly identical to about 600 words from a 1998 paper by Sean Lynn-Jones, a scholar at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, a research institute at Harvard.

Messages and an email left with the Carlisle, Pennsylvania, school were not immediately returned Thursday. The New York Times reported the college was launching an investigation into Walsh’s work.

Republicans need to gain six net seats this fall to control the Senate. South Dakota, West Virginia and Montana are seen as likely GOP pickups, and Republicans have several opportunities to grab the other three seats they need. At the top of their list are incumbent Democrats running in states President Barack Obama lost in 2012: Arkansas, Louisiana, North Carolina and Alaska.

Walsh is the only senator who served in the Iraq war. He capped his long career in the Montana National Guard as the state’s adjutant general before becoming Bullock’s lieutenant governor in 2013, Walsh’s first elected office.

Bullock appointed Walsh, who had already announced his candidacy for the seat, in February when Sen. Max Baucus resigned to become ambassador to China. Republicans and some Democrats blasted the appointment, saying it was made without transparency and was designed to give Walsh a boost against Daines in the election campaign.

Walsh’s military record was first questioned in January when records revealed the Army reprimanded him in 2010 for pressuring Guardsmen to join a private association for which he was seeking a leadership role.

Walsh was adjutant general at the time and wanted to become vice chairman of the National Guard Association of the United States. In the reprimand, Army Vice Chief of Staff Peter Chiarelli said he questioned Walsh’s ability to lead.

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