Bill Clinton and Al Gore can carry off a Southern accent to black and Southern crowds because they are native Southerners. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are not, and are not good actors. Northerners, especially those from the Northeast and Upper Midwest, have too many prejudices to do well sounding Southern. New Yorkers like Carroll O'Connor and Jackie Gleason performed the role of Southern sheriffs with a cornpone accent that sounded at best like southern Brooklyn. Ironically, actors from other English speaking nations do a better job at Southern accents than do non-Southern Americans. The English, Australian, Irish, and Canadian actors in the movie Cold Mountain did a credible job with Southern speech.
Hillary Clinton should consider the fact that Ronald Reagan, who was born and raised less than 100 miles from her suburban Chicago native home, carried the entire South in 1980 and 1984 without ever uttering a "ya'll". So did the elder George Bush, who never made an attempt to hide his Connecticut speech patterns.
The English, Australian, Irish, and Canadian actors in the movie Cold Mountain did a credible job with Southern speech....because the "southern accent" has more in common with the "English" accent. Southerners, especially those from Appalachia, ancestors were mostly Scotch-Irish and English.
New Yorkers like Carroll O'Connor and Jackie Gleason performed the role of Southern sheriffs with a cornpone accent that sounded at best like southern Brooklyn. I was going to mention O'Connor's bad southern accent. Rod Steiger was just as bad in his original interpretation of the role. Add Sean Penn as Willie Stark (Huey Long).
Of course Dallas had the worst amalgam of bad attempts at southern accents. Each person in the whole family spoke with a different accent. The more I watch her, Hillary seems like a bad Dallas villain.