On the March 4, 2007, commemoration of Bloody Sunday in Selma, Alabama, an animated Hillary Clinton spoke from the pulpit of the First Baptist Church, borrowing lines from a James Cleveland hymn. “Ah don’t feel noways tahred!” the senator declared, her drawl booming out to the crowd. The same day found Barack Obama y’alling to his own Selma audience: “Don’t tell me I’m not coming home when I come to Selma, Alabama,” he said. “I’m here because somebody marched for our freedom; I’m here because y’all sacrificed for me.”

The southern-spiced speeches, not surprisingly, soon made it to YouTube—the former, as “Kentucky Fried Hillary”; the latter, as “Barack Obama, Man of 1,000 Voices”—from which they were, in another fairly predictable development, picked up and roundly mocked by the media. “Well, I don’t feel noways tired, neither,” scoffed E. D. Hill on Fox News Live, after re-airing “KF(HR)C” for her audience. Wonkette, the tongue-in-cheek political blog, created a “Pride Goeth Before the Drawl Dept.” to mark—and mock—Obama’s speech. (One reader comment: “I’m from Hawaii and I live in the South now, so I guess I can’t really hear either of his ‘blackcents.’ ”) The syndicated columnist Kathleen Parker wrote an op-ed about Clinton’s speech, likening the senator’s performance to “Granny Clampett auditioning on American Idol.” Bill Moyers observed that Obama used an “inflection…of the southern dialect that you don’t hear in the rest of his speeches,” while the author Shelby Steele, speaking with him on Bill Moyers Journal, argued that Obama is sometimes “John F. Kennedy. Sometimes he’s Martin Luther King. Sometimes he’s Stokely Carmichael…one cannot help but wonder who’s the real [Obama]—what’s his voice?”

It’s a good question. What is his voice? And what’s Clinton’s? “It did seem sort of strange to hear a Yankee affecting a...

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