Who does McCain remind me of???????????????

[Gogi]

This has been torturing me for months, who does McCain sound like? The closest I've come is Topcat in that old cartoon but even that's not quite it. Everytime he says "my friends" it sounds like some old comedian whose name I just cannot remember. Lonesome George Gobel? Phyllis Diller? Totie Fields? Totie Fields had a joke that stopped being funny right after 9/11 (please bear in mind that there were still ocean liners regularly going between NYC and Europe when this was written): ... Friends, we are so lucky to live in this great country...I've just come back from overseas and... when we went past the Statue of Liberty my eyes misted over and as we passed under the Brooklyn Bridge I started to cry, because, my friends, I flew home!

[Berry Cool]

1. I don't know, but his cadence annoys the crap out of me.

He has this really stylized manner of speech (at least when he's speaking in public) even aside from the fact that he can't start a sentence without "My friends." It's his volume and his tone--his volume starts out low and gradually increases toward the middle of his sentence and then it drops down and off. Over and over and over again. And there's just this...way he does it that I can't really describe verbally, I'd have to speak it to you so you could hear it. But it's the same with every sentence. Whereas other people vary their volume, their emphasis, the words they hit at which point in the sentence based on the structure of that sentence. His voice has this kind of simplistic, repetitive, singsongy quality reminiscent of a nursery school or kindergarten teacher trying to explain something to very young children, which means he always sounds a bit as if he's talking down to his audience.

Obama has a very MLK-ish rhythm and tone, and as I said before, I'm sure it's on purpose. He favors dramatic pauses and dragging out his vowels a bit the way MLK did. Just listening to him is like getting a bit of a flashback to a revivalist preacher, to another great African American leader who gave eloquent and inspirational speeches. He could read the text off your electric or gas bill and make it sound like a wonderful speech. If he becomes president, impressionists will love him because he'll be very easy to do imitations of.

Hillary's biggest disadvantages are her flat Midwestern accent and the fact that female voices are not normally built for volume--and if they are, people say they're unfeminine. This is something no woman can really do much about; it's a stereotype and a cliche we all have to live with. So is the fact that when we do speak at loud volume, we will probably remind everyone of some female authority figure they hated when they were kids--whether it's Mom(!), an annoying aunt, a teacher, a playground monitor, etc. Why? Because traditionally that's where women have had the most authority: in situations in which very young children are being looked after. And, yes, the other experience most men (anyway) have with women speaking at loud volume is when they are arguing with their wives. This, too, places Hillary at a disadvantage every time she goes for the volume. This is an unavoidable consequence of our sexist culture. Physiologically, talking at volume is more of a strain on her than on the men, so she tends to sound hoarse and overstrained really quickly, too.