If you saw bits of the speeches delivered by Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama yesterday to commerate the "Bloody Sunday" voting rights march in Selma 42 years ago, you probably wondered where Clinton and Obama picked up their Southern accents.
Both of them developed a pronounced drawl. Hillary's was especially goofy.
I really don't like it when candidates pander to their audiences.
Hillary didn't need to change the way she speaks, and neither did Obama.
It's fake and very annoying.
It wasn't only how they sounded that made them appear foolish, but also what they said.
Both of the Dems took some poetic license as they sucked up to the crowds.
SELMA, Ala., March 4 -- Evoking the passions and rivalries of the civil rights era, Senators Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton made deeply personal appeals to voters in the sanctuaries of black churches here on Sunday, and then joined former President Bill Clinton for a march across a bridge where white police officers beat protesters, most of them black, nearly 42 years ago.
...The visit to Selma, a historically rich, economically struggling city, became a proxy battle for black support between Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama, whose candidacy represents a threat to Mrs. Clinton’s traditional base. That competitive dynamic intensified on Sunday with the debut of Mr. Clinton on the campaign trail, six weeks into his wife’s bid, and among a bloc of voters who are at once devoted to the former president and torn between his wife and Mr. Obama.
...“We’re in the presence today of giants whose shoulders we stand on,” Mr. Obama said at the Brown Chapel A.M.E. Church. “People who battled on behalf not just of African-Americans but on behalf of all Americans, who battled for America’s soul, that shed blood, that endured taunts and torment.”
In a 35-minute address, interrupted repeatedly by applause and shouts of praise from worshipers, Mr. Obama said it was time for his generation to pick up the work of those who had toiled before. He said it was time for the “Joshua generation” — a biblical reference to the leader who succeeded Moses — to urge family and friends to shake their apathy to engage in politics and action.
“I know if cousin Pookie would vote, if brother Jethro would get off the couch and stop watching Sports- Center and go register some folks and go to the polls, we’d have a different kind of politics,” Mr. Obama said, the crowd rising to its feet. “Kick off your bedroom slippers, put on your marching shoes!”
Yikes!
Can you imagine what the reaction would be if a white candidate told "cousin Pookie" and "brother Jethro" to get off their lazy butts, pry themselves away from TV, and go to the polls?
Don't those stereotypes sound like something Ann Coulter might use in an address? She, of course, would be criticized, not cheered.
Down the street, meanwhile, the congregation warmly welcomed Mrs. Clinton, who blended personal anecdotes with a fluidly thematic set of remarks, in which she said the civil rights march “is not over yet.”
“We’ve got to stay awake, we’ve got to stay awake because we have a march to finish,” Mrs. Clinton said, “a march towards one America.”
As usual whenever she's speaking to a largely African-American group, Hillary slipped into her best Southern drawl.
It just doesn't work. It's truly embarrassing.
Also amusing is the way both Obama and Hillary stretched the limits of time, space, and the truth.
Mr. Obama relayed a story of how his Kenyan father and his Kansan mother fell in love because of the tumult of Selma, but he was born in 1961, four years before the confrontation at Selma took place. When asked later, Mr. Obama clarified himself, saying: “I meant the whole civil rights movement.” He also acknowledged for the first time a recent revelation by a genealogist that his mother’s ancestors in Kentucky owned slaves, something reported by The Baltimore Sun last week.
Obama definitely has timeline problems.
...Mrs. Clinton, meanwhile, recalled going with her church youth minister as a teenager in 1963 to hear the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. speak in Chicago. Yet, in her autobiography and elsewhere, Mrs. Clinton has described growing up Republican and being a “Goldwater Girl” in 1964 — in other words, a supporter of the presidential candidacy of Senator Barry M. Goldwater, who opposed the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
Listen to Southern belle Hillary.
"I don't feel no ways tired."
Even the Brits know a fake accent when they hear one:
"I just want to begin by giving praise to the Lord Almighty," said Mrs Clinton, 59, with a Southern twang not normally detectable in her speeches, as she announced she had come as "a sister in worship and a grateful friend and beneficiary of what happened in Selma 42 years ago".It's hilarious!
There's no way you can listen to this without laughing.
It's like some sort of weird timewarp and she's auditioning for a bit part on The Andy Griffith Show.
Good grief!
What are Hillary and Obama doing?
Is this really what candidates have to do to get elected?
It's a joke.
I bet John Edwards is mad because he always sounds like Gomer Pyle.
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