On words

There has been much said back and forth over the past couple of weeks about words versus deeds, with the Clinton campaign trying to make the case that while they will be able to get things done, all Obama has is rhetoric.
Now, it seems to me that a natural response to this is "Words mean something". Followed by "here are some examples of great US rhetoric which changed things. And even someone like me, who grew up in another country and continent can name the speeches, the lines one would quote.
I could have written Deval Patrick's speech. I could have written Obama's speech. Any educated US citizen would have written a similar speech. It is not surprising: it is not original: it is, however, deep and meaningful.
Does Obama's "quoting" of Patrick rise to the level of plagiarism? That to me is a difficult question: at the formal level, probably not, since the words that were identical were actually quotes (and clearly intended as quotes) from earlier speeches. Did his expressing an identical idea with slightly different words make it plagiarism? As I have tried to express above, I don't quite think so.

A completely different question, of course, is whether he or Patrick actually wrote the speech in the first place: and if they both had the same speechwriter write it, can it really be called plagiarism?

Yours, probably saying the same thing as a lot of other people right now,
N.