At the union podium, the First Lady was firmly "on-message," bludgeoning the Republican party with class size. Hers is a low voice, a "chest" voice, as they would say in music, with no "head" in it. She speaks in something of a monotone, with a slight midwestern honk. One of her favorite verbal techniques is "You know, ," at the beginning of a sentence, sometimes pronounced "Ya know" or "Y'know." It is her little launching pad, as in, "You know, the Republicans tried their best to block money for class size." Her lingo is decidedly up-to-date. She uses "reference" as a verb-"those studies that Randi referenced." The language she employs, somehow, reflects the positions she espouses. If you can sound like a left-liberal, quite apart from the opinions you convey, Mrs. Clinton does.
Excerpt from this article at Nat'l Review http://www.nationalreview.com/convention/nr_archives/nr_archives081400a.shtml
Interesting find.If by "favorite verbal technique" the author means to imply a conscious decision to insert the 'you know,' I disagree.
Follow the link to the transcript of the Greenfield interview. The frequency of clinton "you knows" varies directly with intensity of Greenfield contempt and inversely with magnitude of Greenfield softballs; clinton's tic-like insertion of "you know" is quite reflexive, a marker for ineloquence, vulgarity, ignorance, rube-meets-valley-girl demographics, low self-esteem, anxiety and insincerity.