It’s not as bad as the immortal “noways tahhhrd” clip, but that came in front of a mostly black audience and prominent Dems tend to reserve their more cartoonish, insulting accents for minority crowds. Anyway, two theories on the case of the mysterious reappearing twang. One, the charitable version: It’s an unconscious thing Hillary does around southerners after having lived in Arkansas for so many years. My own NYC accent will emerge sometimes, sincerely unintentionally, when I find myself chatting with someone who speaks fluent New Yorkese. Friends from the south who’ve lost traces of their accent over time have told me the same thing happens to them when they go home. I think it’s an artifact of childhood: If you’re born and raised somewhere, absorbing the local patois as you grew up, it’s part of the language that was imprinted on you as a kid. It’s always there. How that explains why someone raised in Illinois would lapse into a drawl now and then is … unclear. Second theory, then: It’s an affectation, willingly adopted by a politician who doesn’t feel connected to her audience as much as she’d like to and is grasping for ways to ingratiate herself. Call this the “phonies gonna phony” theory. Which do you suppose is a better fit?

Just for ONE SECOND imagine Ted or Marco or Jeb doing a speech somewhere and speaking in an exaggerated fake accent.

— Rick Wilson (@TheRickWilson) May 27, 2015

Can’t lie, though. It’d be oddly charming if, whenever she went back to New York, she lapsed into an old-school Brooklyn dialect. Youse are all votin’ for the broad next fall for progress ‘n sh*t, ya hear?