Political consultants believe the absence of a personal apology or acceptance of responsibility on Nuciforo's part has the potential to hurt his candidacy more than the discovery of copied materials on his website.
In this Republican file photo, Former state Senator Andrea Nuciforo Jr. of Pittsfield kicks off his campaign in Holyoke, as he is seeking the Democratic nomination for the US House of Representatives newly formed 1st Congressional District. More politics news
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Congressional candidate Andrea Nuciforo Jr.'s campaign website underwent a significant overhaul on Friday, a day after rival Bill Shein pointed out several instances where passages said to be Nuciforo's views were similar to or the same as those put forth by other Democrats.
Nuciforo, who along with Shein and U.S. Rep. Richard Neal, D-Springfield, are squaring off in a three-way Democratic primary to represent the new 1st Congressional District in Massachusetts, initially called Shein's accusation of plagiarism an instance of "desperate politics." But on Friday, the Nuciforo campaign was busy reworking its stated opinions and blaming the alleged plagiarism on the lack of oversight by a past staffer.
"There is a pretty big team that worked on the website, so it's hard to say exactly who put each of the sections online," said Patrick Tool, a spokesman for the Nuciforo campaign. "The person responsible for oversight of the team has not been with the campaign since June. We feel that all responsibility rests with the person who is no longer with us."
The Republican contacted the past staffer, who asked that his name not be published, and he acknowledged that he was responsible for overseeing the team that crafted and put the candidate's issue sections online.
The ex-staffer said that he worked with John Edwards in the past and offered Nuciforo's team links to position papers from the former presidential candidate, not thinking they would copy and paste them into Nuciforo's website, as was the case with the topics of senior issues and women's rights. The staffer, who has since moved on to another congressional campaign, acknowledged that as a manager, he holds some responsibility for the copied content even though he didn't do it himself.
The sections that were removed from Nuciforo's website on Friday included his purported views on veterans issues, the environment, women's rights and a page talking about issues of importance to older Americans.
By late Friday afternoon, revamped versions of the aforementioned pages began appearing on the campaign website.
In addition to the sections copied verbatim from Edwards, Nuciforo's stated positions and values also contained distinct similarities with former U.S. Senate candidate Alan Khazei, and Stacey Lawson, a Democratic congressional candidate in California’s 2nd district.
The Republican attempted to contact Khazei and Lawson on Friday. Khazei didn't return a request for a call left with his assistant, and Lawson's spokesman was reviewing the content in question before potentially commenting on the topic.
After the news broke on Thursday afternoon of Shein's allegation that Nuciforo's website contained unoriginal material, Nuciforo's campaign initially did not return calls from The Republican. Then at 6:27 p.m., Tool sent out a statement and called The Republican to ensure delivery.
In that statement, Nuciforo said, "Rather than advancing his own candidacy, Mr. Shein has resorted to the desperate politics of a desperate campaign. Voters in the new 1st (Congressional District) deserve better. I stand fully behind the progressive ideas I have put forth in this campaign. The truth is that we stand on the shoulders of giants. Like all policy makers, the ideas advanced by our campaign have been developed and advanced by like-minded Democrats."
Political consultants believe the absence of a personal apology or acceptance of responsibility on Nuciforo's part has the potential to hurt his candidacy more than the discovery of copied materials on his website.
Anthony Cignoli, a political consultant who takes clients from both sides of the aisle but isn't working with any candidate in this race, said that regardless of who should have proofread the issue papers before they went online, responsibility ultimately rests with the candidate.
"Any candidate is always responsible for their campaign staff. You may not be aware of everything they do, but you are the one running for office, not the staffers," Cignoli said. "This is not a Watergate-level of scandal but it is still a big deal. And although the voters may be desensitized to plagiarism, how the candidate is handling it means a lot more."
Matt Barron, a Democratic strategist whose company MLB Research Associates is not involved in the race, also said that Nuciforo should have taken responsibility up front.
"Harry Truman had a sign on his desk that said 'The buck stops here,' " Barron said. "It is a slippery slope to throw staffers under the bus, and now Nuciforo needs to decide how long he wants this to play out. As we saw with Elizabeth Warren's debacle over her Native American heritage, it is better to come clean early on."
Both Cignoli and Barron reflected that with less than a month until the Sept. 6 primary election that will determine who represents the new congressional district in Washington, any scandal is not a good thing.
Additionally, Cignoli questioned how a candidate who declared he was running back in 2009 before the new districts were drawn could not have had the time to put out his own positions.
And although the sections of the Nuciforo campaign website in question were taken down on Friday, as many politicians have learned the hard way, online content has a way of outlasting the news cycle surrounding a controversy.
Shein emailed a document to reporters on Friday highlighting the instances of the same or similar statements shared by Nuciforo and the aforementioned Democrats. That document can be seen below:
Nuciforo's views compared to other Democrats
Nuciforo isn't the first politician to be accused of taking the ideas of another and presenting them as his own, and he likely won't be the last.
In October, Republican U.S. Sen. Scott Brown's website was found to have a passage that contained several sentences which were verbatim remarks delivered by ex-North Carolina Senator Elizabeth Dole in 2002. At the time, Brown's Senate office in Washington attributed the similarities to his website being based off of the template of Dole's website.
The words were removed and Brown moved on to today, where he is running a close race against Warren.
During the 2008 Democratic presidential primary, candidate Hillary Clinton accused then-candidate Barack Obama of lifting parts of a speech delivered in Milwaukee, Wisc., from Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick.
Once the allegations hit the news, Obama said that he and Patrick, a longtime friend, wrote the speech together, and he acknowledged that he should have credited him. But before long, Obama moved past the plagiarism allegation and went on to become president of the United States.
Another incident dates back to the 1988 presidential campaign by then-U.S. Sen. Joe Biden, who was found to have taken without credit portions of a speech by Neil Kinnock, leader of the British Labour Party. When media reports emerged about the similarities between the two speeches, Biden didn't address the controversy head-on, and further reports emerged that he had borrowed without attribution from Robert Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey.
The response to the plagiarism stories are partially credited for ending Biden's 1988 presidential run, although 20 years later, Biden ended up becoming a vice president to serve alongside Obama in the current administration.