Though it's not as blatant as the speech which got noticed at Fox News and many center-right outlets (and, of course, nowhere else) eight years ago, it's clear that Hillary Clinton once again altered her diction and style several days ago to (in her mind, one would surmise) "adapt" them to her Southern audience.
This time, Mrs. Clinton was being interviewed by South Carolina Democratic Party Chairman Jaime Harrison. Shoshana Weissman at the Weekly Standard took excerpts from that interview (the full interview is here) and gave certain words and phrases ratings of one to five "cowboy boots," depending on how obvious her regional language "adaptations" were:
Those who believe that this is all quibbling over nothing need to ask themselves whether the press would ignore such obvious alterations in a candidate's speech patterns tailored to a Southern audience (in this case, a black interviewer) if any current GOP presidential contender did the same thing. The answer is that the press would pounce faster than an African lion on its prey. One of their primary lines of attack would be to question the candidate's authenticity — and, to be clear, it would be a fair question. Why is it not fair to question Mrs. Clinton's authenticity now?
In March 2007, Hillary Clinton was speaking at the First Baptist Church in Selma, Alabama when she went full-bore into her Southern accent routine. As readers will see, even Fox News's Alan Colmes, a hardened liberal, noted that Mrs. Clinton "took a trip down South, and apparently so did her accent":
Only a handful of center-right blogs have covered Hillary's latest regional pandering enterprise. The establishment press, as unfortunately expected, is AWOL.
Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.
