Paul Waldman writes about former Minnesota governor and likely 2012 GOP presidential candidate Tim Pawlenty's tendency to adopt a Southern accent when speaking in front of certain audiences:
The irony here is that what Pawlenty is trying to achieve by putting on an inauthentic accent is...authenticity. We have this strange idea that being Southern makes you authentic and real, down-home, the kind of politician regular folks can relate to. Or at least Washington-based journalists who are not themselves from the South have that idea.
Though in truth, this usually applies more to Democrats than Republicans. There's a presumption of inauthenticity that Democrats are tagged with, that unless they come from the South, they have to prove that they can relate to the common man. Republicans usually get the benefit of the doubt, unless they demonstrate otherwise. It's assumed that the South and the things that are popular there -- NASCAR, country music, etc. -- are "real," while things popular in the Northeast or West are somehow not quite real. If you want to show voters how ordinary you are, you're supposed to stage some kind of event where you can nod to these cultural markers. Remember how the last Republican who had trouble relating, George H.W. Bush, made it known that he loved pork rinds?
I think Waldman is actually talking about two different things here, code-switching and politicians' attempts to affect a certain brand of white authenticity. Sometimes the two go hand in hand, sometimes they don't -- as a candidate, Barack Obama code-switched flawlessly on the campaign trail. Hillary Clinton, less flawlessly.
This is a little different from trying to affect an artificial construct of the Real American, but generally speaking, different audiences want different things, and I'm not opposed to the idea of politicians appealing to them in different ways, nor is doing so necessarily a mark of insincerity. Lots of black people code-switch between their personal and professional lives; I've always thought that Obama doing so was his way of communicating that he is aware of and has experienced the ways in which racial demarcations in American society are still relevant. Pawlenty's real problem is that it's really obvious.
