Br’er Hillary and the Briar Patch of Identity

Recently the blogosphere EXPLODED over Hillary Clinton’s supposedly “fake” black southern accent. Here are some articles to read that discuss the incident in which Hillary went to a southern town to woo Black voters at the same time Obama visited. While that move was pretty phony, as Hillary wouldn’t have been likely to visit the town had Obama not decided to go there, I believe her (attempt at) adaptation of a southern accent has been unfairly criticized.

Here is the sound clip that some internet news thing called a “blog” posted recently:

The Southern Clip is interesting mainly because there’s a long history of adapting accents in politics. Politicians have been doing it for years, and now it is finally being scrutinized. I remember Kerry doing it, Gore doing it, and George W. Bush has affected a regional accent for years and years. Kucinich recently did something similar, though his example was overshadowed by his singing. Hell, even the elections in the 19th century created “rural” back-stories, Zachary Taylor and Andrew Jackson especially. Under this light the phrase “mayer Paaahmer frum Trentin” seems less strange, but the clip still turns my stomach.

I think the stomach turning is the result of a failure to adapt. Most people adapt their linguistic features for different peer groups, so it isn’t that surprising that Hillary would do the same thing when trying to get support from southern Black voters. You wouldn’t talk to your boss the same way you’d talk to your best friend, and even if they were the same person, you’d use a particular set of linguistic features depending on the situation you’re speaking in. Typically these changes aren’t conscious, but subconscious as the language features and grammar rules change from situation to situation and it would be nearly impossible to systematically try to remember the features of a language and adapt your speech line by line. That’s why Hillary’s speech sounds so robotic and unnatural– she doesn’t have the capacity to easily slip into a southern dialect.

Does this make Hillary less “authentic?” Perhaps, but only in the context that that isn’t a speech pattern she’s used to using so she just ends up sounding phony and almost minstrelesque. By the end of an election cycle, most of the candidates get flattened into two dimensional caricatures anyway, usually at the will of their opponents campaign or their own (see Dukakis and “card carrying member of the ACLU” and Pres. Bush’s Press Brush Clearing Oppurtunities). It’s only in instances like this where the characterization is done poorly when a larger audience notices.

It might be that Hillary’s discontect with the image she’s trying to harness is so far separated from the “real” Hillary that she ends up coming across as disingenuous. Instead of shying away from her intellectual strong woman persona, Hillary should be embracing what makes her different, as Obama does with his Story (TM). If she hopes to succeed (at least in the blogosphere, whatever that’s worth) Hillary needs to get her act together and decide who she wants to be seen as, before her opponents do it for her.