In politics, style is substance, which is why, when Hillary Clinton's likeability rating is sinking, she starts dropping her "g's. Dropping as in droppin', that is. 
"Let me tell you somethin,' " she said the other day, shortly before appropriating that none-too-funny Ronald Reagan joke about a guy standing in a pile of manure "diggin' and diggin' and diggin'." This, apparently, is her Hillbilly mode, a Just Folks incarnation replete with her very own take on a Southern accent.
You’ll hear that accent when likening herself to Rocky Balboa or claiming that lying is misstating or talkin' 'bout how she's gonna take the race all the way t' Denver. When she morphs into Ready-on-Day-One Hillary or Outraged Hillary the accent fades away quicker than a puddle in the sun.
Tone is another expression of style, and Hillary is a candidate of many tones, none more irksome than the one she assumes for Reasonable, No-Reason-to-Hate-Me-Hillary in which she sounds like an ungifted kindergarten teacher addressing a roomful of balky five year olds. Victim Hillary comes in two distinct tones: Spunky or Aggrieved, though from both you can glean that she has yet to apprehend that victimization is an inside job. What's victimizing Hillary Clinton isn't all those misogynists that Sir Elton invoked. What's victimizing her is that load of personae’s she's lugging around, that calvalcade of Hillary's rivaled in number only by the number of times she used to change her hair. How ironic that the first presidential candidate claimed by feminists is mired in the pre-feminist notion that women are, as Gloria Steinem once put it, "how we look and how we please".
Back in her First Lady days, Hillary's hair issues -- the ever-changing head-bands, pageboys, upswept lacquered do's -- sent the same signal that her personality changes send now: either she doesn't know who she is, or she knows exactly who she is and figures we won't like it.
Early in her campaign, one of her minions described her as the most famous person you don't know. This was interesting, given that the individuals we admire most in public life are people who know themselves long before we know them. It is precisely their sense of self that vaults them into the positions they come to hold, however deluded or inflated that sense of self may be. For better or worse, their center holds: they seem steadfast if you agree with them and stubborn if you don't.  Polling may tell them what to do, but they require polls to tell them who to be.
But then Senator Clinton entered public life via someone else's sense of self, and her self-definition (no baking cookies) has been reactive and relative all along. In those much bally-hooed 35 years in public life, what's pushed her onward and upward is her ambition, not her identity. Which is why, after weeks of Win-At-All-Costs-Hillary we've been treated to a brief, Jay Leno-assisted "charm offensive" with a ringside view of her "funnier, softer side".
For now, we’re back to that stand-by: Ready-On-Day-One, 35-Years-of-Experience Hillary. Something else will follow those personae, though the micro polling on what it should be may not be ready yet. What it will be one can only imagine. The other day, answering a question, she said "Let me say this about that." Uh-oh. Remember that phrase. Can it be that she's channeling her inner Nixon?