Elizabeth Warren and the down-to-earth trap

So if “I’m gonna get me a beer” is typical of the speech of those who grew up where Warren did, and it was appropriate for the casual moment, why has she been so mocked for saying it? One immediate answer is that Warren is being criticized for everything at the moment, especially anything related to her purported lack of “likability” (criticisms that, as Peter Beinart has noted, are heavily gendered).

Yale linguist Laurence R. Horn, who has studied the personal dative and its appearances in politics and popular culture, discerns in the Warren brouhaha an echo of previous derision surrounding a Democratic presidential candidate. In 2004, just a couple of weeks before the general election, John Kerry went into an Ohio grocery store and inquired of the owner, “Can I get me a hunting license here?” A commentary in the conservative Washington Times noted at the time, “Even the phraseology sounded staged. Mr. Kerry ordinarily doesn’t talk this way, and his language sounded fake and patronizing—as if he was pretending to talk like someone from rural Ohio.” Kerry, unlike Warren, really does come from a patrician New England background, so “get me a hunting license” did seem like he was trying too hard to take on the speech patterns of the Ohioans whose votes he was courting.