This seems vitally important:
“During her tenure in politics, Hillary Clinton has shifted between several distinct versions of American English. This is not terribly unusual. President Obama has been known to change his pronunciation according to region and audience. But the thing about Clinton is that she’s been in the game for so long, and has had so many different jobs and lived in so many different places, that her various accents wind up mapping her career,” Bloomberg reports.
“During the 2008 campaign, Clinton called herself ‘multilingual,’ because she’s spent so much time in the South, the East Coast, and the Midwest. But the different accents don’t seem to appear randomly—they seem to come out based on where Clinton is, what role she has, or what office she’s running for.”
Is this newsworthy? Does it feed the narrative that Clinton is so ambitious that she’ll try to be all things to all people?
I’d note here that the article is careful to mention that politicians often shift their pronunciation depending on what part of the country they are addressing, so it’s hard to see how this is groundbreaking reporting.
