Readers, set down for a spell wid me, y’hear?
Oh, sorry—got caught up in the down-home authenticity of Kamala Harris on the campaign trail. People talk about the word salad she usually serves, but there’s something off about the dressing, too.
What is her accent? How many does she have? And which one is real?
These are not easy questions to answer. Depending on where she is and who she’s talking to, Kamala Harris can sound like a typical Millennial corporate girl-boss who thinks vocal fry makes her sound serious, or like she’s trying out for a pancake syrup commercial in old Dixie.
You could hear it in her recent softball interview with CNN’s Dana Bash (also with her security blanket, running mate Tim Walz). Harris alternated between the low-pitched croaking vocal fry that some women use to sound “serious,” and a high-pitched, little-girl-with-a-small-mouth cutesy tone. Her voice can’t decide what it wants to be, because Harris cannot decide who she wants to be.
Well, really, she wants to be all things to all people, which is likely why she changes up her speaking pattern so drastically depending on her audience. Some would call that smart politics; others would call it sociopathy.
Let’s look back at just a few weeks ago when Kam Kam was speaking to an audience in Georgia. Remember, this is a woman who grew up in solidly middle class Berkeley, but she can’t even be honest about that. Even the New York Times, partisan as it is, called her on the carpet for having “virtually erased Berkeley, her hometown, from her campaign biography.” Whatever her natural accent, it’s highly likely to sound like a middle class kid from California.
So where in tarnation did this drawl come from?
You can watch a video of her most recent drawl below – which also includes three minutes of other cases where Harris did exactly this.
Let us render the most recent into the written word for you:
“You awl hay-alped us do that and you goan help us agin in twunneh-twunneh-foe-wer.” Given how eager she is to portray herself as an integral part of the historic civil rights movement (“And, you know, there was a little girl in California who was part of the second class to integrate her public schools, and she was bused to school every day. And that little girl was me.”), one half expects her to say she was the little girl in the old Shake-n-Bake Commercial, too.
Southern-fried Kam Kam is out on the trail again, this time—strangely—in Detroit. Watch that below – and then compare it to how she spoke in Pittsburgh when she delivered the exact same line. As you were expecting, she magically adopted a new accent within hours (both clips are in the video below):
Slay, kween?
We know what we think of this linguistic legerdemain, but let’s see what the internet thinks!
OK y’all this one done burnt my biscuits:
Tee-hee.
Uh-oh, someone dragged Hillary into this:
