During the 2007/2008 Democratic presidential primaries, the media periodically mocked Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton for changing the way they talked in front of certain audiences -- Clinton's southern accent thickening a bit when she was speaking in the South, for example. Like much of the primary-season nit-picking, it didn't really make much sense, as what Clinton and Obama were doing is quite common. Maybe that's why the criticism seemed to have been short-lived -- I don't remember it continuing through the general election.

But now Newsbuster Tim Graham, director of media analysis at the Media Research Center (which is a bit like being director of respiratory health for Philip Morris) resurrects this nonsense in order to declare Obama a “Phony.” Here's Graham, at his Caulfield-iest:

How phony is Barack Obama? PBS Washington Week host Gwen Ifill reviewed New Yorker editor David Remnick's new Obama book The Bridge in the Washington Post Outlook section Sunday, and she kept finding Obama is a Slick Barry, a “shape shifter.” Obama even admitted to rhetoric what should be obvious -- how he changes “dialects” depending on the audience he's talking to:

Obama cops to this. “The fact that I conjugate my verbs and speak in a typical Midwestern newscaster's voice -- there's no doubt that this helps ease communication between myself and white audiences,” he tells Remnick.

“And there's no doubt that when I'm with a black audience I slip into a slightly different dialect. But the point is, I don't feel the need to speak a certain way in front of a black audience. There's a level of self-consciousness about these issues the previous generation had to negotiate that I don't feel I have to.”

Look: People often adapt their speaking style to their audience. It's totally natural. Anyone who has ever spent time in both the North and the South with someone who used to live in the South knows this. Anyone who changes the way they talk based on whether they are conversing with a 4 year old or an adult knows this. Anyone who talks differently in a courtroom than on a basketball court knows this. As Slate explained in 2007:

Does anyone naturally speak with more than one accent?

Yes, lots of people do. We're all guilty of changing the way we speak in subtle ways, depending on whom we're talking to. Linguists call this “code shifting”-you don't want to talk to your boss the same way you talk to your old college roommates. We often code shift subconsciously, by picking up other people's speech patterns (as anyone who has ever studied abroad probably knows). Politicians and actors, on the other hand, sometimes hire vocal coaches to help them with their speech. But it isn't too difficult to adopt a bit of a twang. It's easier to match an accent if you've heard quite a bit of it-as Clinton has from the mouth of her Arkansas-born husband. (American politicians aren't the only leaders who try to sound more down-home: Last year, England's Queen Elizabeth was accused of folksying up her speech.)

So, Barack Obama, who was president of the Harvard Law Review, “conjugate[s] his verbs.” And Barack Obama, who lived much of his life in Illinois, speaks in a “typical Midwestern newscaster's voice.” And Barack Obama, who is black, sometimes speaks in a dialect familiar to his black audiences. This is stunning, stunning stuff -- unless you realize that the vast majority of humans do not speak in precisely the same way at all times. It isn't like he's mimicking William H. Macy in Fargo every time he visits the upper midwest.