Iowa First Lady Christie Vilsack, a key factor in John Kerry's primary sweep and the primetime convention speaker tomorrow, has derided blacks, southerners and easterners as bad speakers because she couldn't understand them. In inflammatory columns for her local newspaper obtained by the Herald, the normally soft-spoken Vilsack tore into several minority and ethnic groups while lampooning non-midwesterners for regional dialects. ``I am fascinated at the way some African-Americans speak to each other in an English I struggle to understand, then switch to standard English when the situation requires,'' Vilsack wrote in a 1994 column in the Mount Pleasant News,...