BuzzFeed has been all over Monica Wehby this week, and yesterday turned up a fact that will no doubt be used as a missile as the pediatric brain surgeon goes after US Sen. Jeff Merkley’s seat this fall.

It looks very much like Wehby—who’s based a lot of her campaign on touting her health care expertise and criticizing Merkley’s support of Obamacare—swiped big swaths of her initial health care proposal from a survey floated by the conservative group American Crossroads, co-founded by Karl Rove.

BuzzFeed highlighted five instances in which Wehby’s proposals mirrored the Crossroads verbiage. They’re close enough that, if they’d been written by a BuzzFeed reporter, he’d probably be fired. But Wehby’s campaign has only reacted by issuing a huffy statement calling the observations absurd. Check them out for yourself.

From the story:

Wehby’s plan has since been stripped from her website but a link to it from her website still leads to her copied plan.

Rove’s group’s survey came out June 2013, while Wehby’s plan was from November of that year.

“The suggestion that a pediatric neurosurgeon needs to copy a health care
plan from American Crossroads is absurd,” a Wehby campaign spokesman told BuzzFeed News. “Dr. Wehby is too busy performing brain surgery on sick children to respond, sorry.”

It doesn’t stop there.

Just today, the Wehby camp removed an entire “Issues” section from its site, reports the Oregonian‘s Jeff Mapes. According to the O, the campaign merely took down the material to fix an error pointed out earlier today, also by BuzzFeed: They’d misquoted Thomas Jefferson.

One way Wehby’s campaign is dealing with the allegations: Challenging Merkley to a debate on health care. In a release issued this afternoon, campaign spokesman Dean Petrone is quoted as follows:

“Dr. Monica Wehby has spent the last thirty years practicing medicine, treating patients, and developing an expertise in an industry that is currently riddled with inefficiencies, and malpractice exacerbated by the policies of Jeff Merkley. To put it succinctly, Dr. Wehby has forgotten more about health care than Jeff Merkley knows and we look forward to a series of debates on this important issue.”

Update, 3:25 pm: Sorry, I missed one. BuzzFeed also found uncomfortable similarities between Wehby’s economic proposals and those of a couple other Republicans. Yikes.

Also: Wehby’s now blaming staffers, predictably.

“These website pages were authored by staff that are no longer employed by the campaign and were immediately removed once brought to our attention,” says a just-issued statement from the campaign.

I'm a news reporter for the Mercury. I've spent a lot of the last decade in journalism — covering tragedy and chicanery in the hills of southwest Missouri, politics in Washington, D.C., and other matters...

3 replies on “BuzzFeed’s Not Done With Monica Wehby: First Plagiarism, Now Shoddy Quotes”

  2. As a registered Democrat, who has worked on 2 Democratic Presidential Campaigns, I just wish I could get excited about Merkley though.

    I think maybe Wehby may be a little nuts, what with the stalking shit… I dunno…. but I respect her intellect level far more than Merkley’s — easily.

    The main problem with ‘Obamacare’, as far as I can see it, is that it doesn’t go far enough. There is much room to critisize here.
    If only the US would have have adopted a similar model to the Canadians….

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