Are speechwriters duping voters?

A Washington Post op-ed writer says writing politicians’ speeches is like buying college term papers

If you do speechwriting, no matter where you are on the political spectrum, you probably got a big chuckle about media stories expressing shock that VP candidate Sarah Palin’s RNC convention speech was (gasp!) written by a speechwriter. (What next—America discovers that politicians don’t write and direct their own campaign commercials?)

The fuss over Palin’s ghosted speech (written, for the record, by Matt Scully) spurred on David McGrath, an English professor at the University of South Alabama, to pen an op-ed in The Washington Post decrying the morally suspect practice of writing speeches for elected officials. “How can we know,” writes McGrath, “whether a line, or an entire speech, comes from the brains of McCain or Obama, or from hired staffers?”