Mitt Romney
Linguistic roots: Michigan
Lakoff: "So smooth, so bland. Sounds exactly like a news anchor. That's how Father Knows Best sounded: 'Hello, Princess. What have you been doing today?'"

Rudolph Giuliani
Linguistic roots: New Yawk
Lakoff: "Flat intonation is one of the things that spells 'tough guy.'"

John Edwards
Linguistic roots: North Carolina
Lakoff: "He's got more inflectional variety. Notice that he has r's, which is not characteristic. He's probably put them in."

John McCain
Linguistic roots: Navy brat
Lakoff: "He verges between informal folksiness and a kind of military stiffness."

Barack Obama
Linguistic roots: A globe-trotting childhood; Midwestern adulthood
Lakoff: "It's as if he doesn't quite know himself linguistically. 'Am I a more formal guy, or am I a laid-back guy like everyone says I am?' He moves sometimes between colloquial bits that might be taken as black English, but he gets off them so fast you can hardly see it."

Ron Paul
Linguistic roots: Transplanted from Pittsburgh to Texas
Lakoff: "He's almost squeaking. He's getting higher and higher. It sort of sounds like whininess. I always thought that Bush's whininess was just Bush being whiny, but maybe it's a Texas thing."

Fred Thompson
Linguistic roots: Born in Alabama; raised in Tennessee
Lakoff: "There's something about his voice—it's very different from Edwards' intonation. This is Rhett Butler South, as opposed to Ashley Wilkes South."

Mike Huckabee
Linguistic roots: Hope, Arkansas—same as Bill Clinton
Lakoff: "Mike's articulation is much less Southern than Bill Clinton's: more harsh, even raspy. What gives Clinton the appearance of Southernness is the softness of his vocalization, and the tilting of the head, which seems flirtatious."

Hillary Clinton
Linguistic roots: Illinois
Lakoff: "In the past there was more of a trace of Chicago and its environs than I'm seeing right here." On the now-infamous video clip of Clinton's attempt at a Southern accent: "That was the worst thing I've ever seen her do. It's very clear that she's representing herself as someone that she isn't."