Hillary Clinton was in Alabama a few days ago. As she has in the past at least two other times when south of the Mason-Dixon line, she decided that she could drop the letter "g" from several of her "i-n-g" words while affecting a sort-of Southern accent.
This time she was in Alabama. Mrs. Clinton cut the "g" from the at least the following words she has no trouble fully pronouncing when she's in other areas of the country: having ("havin'"), saying ("sayin'"), working ("workin'") and saving ("savin'"). She also bizarrely put the accent in the words "recession" and "depression" on the first syllable. No one in the establishment press appears to care about this apparent region-based condescension, though to be fair the video involved (but no related story I could find covering what she said in it) is from the Associated Press.
In the segment shown, Mrs. Clinton indulges in standard Democratic Party economic mythology:
Transcript (bolds are mine):
There is a pattern of Republicans getting us into economic messes and Democratic presidents havin' to come in and clean them up.
Y'know, when my husband became President, thanks to a lot of you in this room, I remember after that election in '92, him sayin' to me, "It's so much worse than they told us." The debt of our country had been quadrupled in the prior 12 years. The deficits had exploded. [1] And so he had to roll up his sleeves and work hard, and at the end of eight years, we had 23 million new jobs, incomes were rising at the top, the middle, workin' folks, poor people. [2]
And we ended up with a balanced budget and a surplus. And then we got another Republican president. [3] And boy, did he leave a mess to President Obama. [4]
(snip in video)
... We were on the brink of a Great Depression, not just a recession. We were losing 800,000 jobs a month. [5]
Now I know these are inconvenient facts for your Republican friends and neighbors, but President Obama doesn't get the credit he deserves for savin' the American economy from falling into a Great Depression.
Notes:
[1] — The U.S. economy grew 3.6 percent in 1992. Bill Clinton lied about the economy to get elected ("worst economy in 50 years"), and the press let him. The debt and deficits to which Mrs. Clinton referred are child's play compared to what we've seen President Obama run up in seven years.
[2] — The GOP Congress gets the lion's share of the credit for mildly reining in spending and keeping Bill Clinton from doing the kind of damage to the economy he tried to do during his first two years in office (e.g., HillaryCare).
[3] — Clinton gave George W. Bush the Internet bubble economy. Clinton's SEC allowed any company with an Internet idea go public even if it barely had a business plan; many of them imploded, inflicting staggering losses on investors. The economy contracted at an annual rate of 1.1 percent in the first quarter of 2001, a result which can't defensibly be blamed on the brand-new president.
[4] — Democratic "fair housing" legislation, Democratic crony companies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and Democrat Andy Cuomo's Housing and Urban Development efforts created the housing mess and caused the Great Recession.
[5] — President Obama's campaign and transition statements and actions in 2008 worsened and lengthened the recession. His "stimulus" plan and sky-high deficits have caused the resulting "recovery" to be painfully weak for over six years.
Here's Curtis Mills's take at the Washington Examiner:
Hillary Clinton has started faking a Southern drawl to speak to Southerners, just as she did during her last presidential run eight years ago."
The instance to which Mills was referring was 2008 presidential candidate Clinton's March 2007 "I don't feel no ways tired" speech.
As I noted at the time, she also put her affectation on display far more recently in early August in an interview with South Carolina's Democratic Party chairman.
If any other candidate — likely even any other non-Southern Democrat – affected a Southern drawl to pander to a regional crowd, the establishment press would be all over it, questioning their genuineness and accusing them of insulting their audience.
Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.
