In the New York Observer interview that Noam cited earlier, Mark Penn boasts:
I have won about 70 major elections around the world, including many presidents, and I devised the simple message for Tony Blair in his last successful campaign: ‘Forward, Not Back.’
Now, normally I wouldn't bring this up. But given that the Clinton campaign has made clear its horror of anything that remotely smacks of plagiarism, I feel obligated to point out that the slogan "Forward, Not Back" was stolen from another political campaign. I refer, of course, to the extraterrestrial Kang's 1996 presidential run on "The Simpsons":
We must move forward, not backward; upward, not forward; and always twirling, twirling, twirling towards freedom.
No word yet on whether Kang gave Penn "permission" to borrow his words.
--Christopher Orr