Josh Mandel’s shifting voice

It’s Friday, so why not have some fun on the Plank. For a good laugh, check out this clip of Josh Mandel, the Ohio treasurer and Republican challenger to Sen. Sherrod Brown, speaking on Tuesday to several hundred coal miners in Beallsville, in the coal country of Appalachian southeastern Ohio, not far from Wheeling, W.V. Mandel, an exceedingly youthful-looking 34-year-old, grew up in the suburbs of Cleveland, which, last I checked, is pretty much up north—on a lake that borders Canada. But I was at this Beallsville event, and noticed that Mandel’s accent was traveling south by about 100 miles a sentence, really kicking in around the 1:50 mark here. Mandel is hardly the first politician to take on adaptive coloring—Hillary Clinton got comically Southern at points in the 2008 primaries, and Barack Obama gets noticeably more vernacular when speaking to African-American audiences, particularly down South. Mandel has now joined this hallowed tradition.

Alec MacGillis — “How To Talk To Reglar Folks In Real Amurka: Listening to Josh Mandel’s Fake Southern-Appalachian Accent”