Because, pardner, Ol' T-Paw done grew up punchin' cows in South Sain' Paul

A Facebook friend wondered yesterday morning, "Anyone just hear Pawlenty on MPR?  Where did this new cowboy accent come from?"

At the Washington Post, Dana Milbank noticed the same thing in With Pawlenty's Iowa speech, a side of syrup:

But now Pawlenty is campaigning as if he's some sort of Southern preacher. At the Faith & Freedom event, he was dropping g's all over the place, using "ain't" instead of "isn't," and adding a syrup to his vowels not indigenous to Minnesota. He didn't utter the word "jobs," made only passing reference to economic woes, and instead gave the assembled religious conservatives a fiery speech about God, gays and gynecology.

There's a logical explanation.  When Tim Pawlenty grew up in South St. Paul, the stockyards were still going. Little Timmy probably slipped out of the house and his father's Teamster vernacular to punch a few cows and pick up the inflections of the High Plains drifters who herded Elsie through the streets to her fate.

It doesn't sound like he was talking to Minnesota farmers who raised the cattle, by golly.

Milbank notes that the problem for the GOP in 2012 might not be inflection, grammar, or diction, but content:

In 2010, Republicans harnessed anger at Obama for his perceived overreaching, particularly on health care. But that theme has been blunted: Now in power, Republicans such as Scott Walker have demonstrated that they are every bit as capable of overreach. Likewise, the Republicans' economic message is beginning to atrophy as private-sector job growth improves and the new House Republican majority struggles to focus on the economy.

Instead, the religious conservatives who dominate primaries are pulling Republicans back toward themes such as abortion and gay rights. The Tea Party is morphing from an economic movement into a conventional moral crusade.

Or as in the case of Minnesota, they might follow Glenn Gruenhagen's lead and mix it a bit, blaming both "sodomy" and, as I noted yesterday in Playing politics with pain: Glenn Gruenhagen blames Hutch Tech lay-off on taxes, taxes--in cases where manufacturing lines (set up during the administration of  a Democratic governor of a neighboring state or in Thailand) were the greatest factors influencing restructuring.

But why play straight with the facts?

Note: As someone who studied poesy at the University of Arkansas with some wonderful writers from North Carolina, Mississippi and Arkansas, I appreciate an authentic southern accent. But those of us from South St. Paul and Southern Minnesota have our own dulcet tones.

Photo: The last days of South St. Paul's Central Livestock Association in 2008. via the NYTimes.

Comments

[Phoenix Woman]

Timmeh's so frickin' desperate. He's spent the past decade doing little else but sucking up to increasingly rabid Bircher Republican primary voters, even working to get the RNC held in St. Paul just to get their backing for his bid to be on the 2008 ticket with McCain, and not only has he failed to make it out of single digits, he's being overtaken by Michele Bachmann.