I was sitting around with Steve earlier this morning and, as usual, the conversation turned to politics. He asked me if I’d seen Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama down in Selma, AL this past weekend.
Apparently, I was the only one who missed it. Both Senators were widely lambasted for adopting Southern accents during their speeches in Selma. The news even made it on to BuzzFeed.
In all fairness, when I get around folks who talk differently than I do, I start picking up their inflections. I once deeply offended someone because she thought I was making fun of her accent. That could be the case with both Senators. But both of them should know better by now.
You can’t affect an accent, no matter how unintentional, in any part of the country nowadays. Why? Two reasons:
- The broadcast medium. Video doesn’t just stream over the airwaves and then go into a vault. It lingers in the blogosphere to be played again, and again and again.
- The commentators. Dan Rather or Diane Sawyer might have overlooked the Southern accent issue out of propriety. It’s not in a newscaster’s job description to poke fun — unless the newscaster’s name happens to be Stewart…or Colbert.
In the past, the worst that could happen is that traditional conservative talk shows would pick up on something stupid that a liberal candidate had done. But even then, the audience would primarily be people who wouldn’t vote for that candidate under any circumstances anyway.
But we now live in the era of bloggers. And bloggers are not Dan Rather. They’re not Jon Stewart. And they’re not Sean Hannity. And when it comes to politics, the conservative blogosphere is ready to exploit any weakness on the part of liberal candidates (and vice versa!).
So keep it in mind. Don’t say anything in public if you don’t want to say it to the whole world.
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