As both a Southerner and a political junkie, one of my favorite facets of American politics is seeing how the Presidential wannabes deal with "the Southern thing."

"What makes Southerners tick?" they wonder.  Dropping the names of NASCAR drivers?  Speeches laced with Toby Keith lyrics?  A palate for fatback and collard greens?

The most recent case-study is Senator Joe Biden, a Democrat from Delaware and '08 Presidential hopeful, who visited South Carolina last week.

Back in August, Biden garnered criticism in the blogosphere for touting that his state "was a slave state" on a Fox News show.

Not only is Biden still using the "slave state" line, but he's expanded it in his Southern stump repertoire.  Last week he spoke to a Rotary Club meeting in Columbia, South Carolina -- a group comprised in large part by Republicans.

"I want to thank you all for allowing me a trip here to speak to only Republicans. It's like my hometown. I just won every district in my state except the one I live in," he quipped. ...

The senator then pounced on a member's announcement that the club would hold its annual Christmas party at the state Department of Archives and History where members could view the original copy of the state's Articles of Secession.

Biden asked, "Where else could I go to a Rotary Club where (for a) Christmas party the highlight is looking at the Articles?" ...

Delaware, he noted, was a "slave state that fought beside the North. That's only because we couldn't figure out how to get to the South. There were a couple of states in the way."

Contrary to what some folks outside the South must think, we Southerners don't wake up in the morning thinking about how our ancestors either were slaves or owned slaves.  Of course it's a part of our cultural identity, but we don't define ourselves by it.  (And maybe it's because I'm not a Rotarian, but I've never laid eyes on the Articles of Confederation.)

Biden has strong ties in South Carolina. He delivered the eulogy of the late Senator Strom Thurmond (at Thurmond's request) and was one of former Senator Fritz Hollings' (D-SC) closest friends in the Senate.  Biden is well-regarded by top African-American Democratic activists in the state.  But would he have made the same "slave state" quip at an AME Church event?

Southerners can sniff out a fake...because we're pros at faking.  The "Southern hospitality" modus operandi isn't always a matter of instinct, after all.

The best approach for reaching Southerners (and folks everywhere, for that matter) is to be genuine.  If you don't look good in camouflage, don't wear it.  If grits make you dry-heave, don't eat them.  (And if you do eat them but put sugar in them, well, we really don't want to see that either...but that's just a grits thing.)

There's no better example of a politician able to relate to folks without feigning chameleon than former Virginia Governor Mark Warner.

In his bid for Governor, Warner didn't win the hearts of rural Virginians by pretending to be one of them.  He was himself -- a Connecticut boy who struck it rich by hard work, and one who showed deference to Southern pastimes but didn't pretend he was intimately familiar with a culture with which he wasn't.  In an excerpt from a Newsweek piece highlighted in Steve Jarding and Mudcat Saunders' book Foxes in the Henhouse, Matt Bai wrote the following passage, which captures this "relatablity" quality of Warner:

The entrance to the Fiddler's Convention in Galax was at the top of this steep embankment, and when Mark Warner hopped out of his SUV and started to make his way down the slope, dressed in a polo shirt and pressed jeans like he'd just left the country club, I think I actually cringed for him.  Thousands of families from Southwest and Southside Virginia and neighboring Appalachian states were camped out in the mud, sending their kids for fried dough and cotton candy while they listened to bluegrass all around them. ...

...Here came Warner, the Harvard-educated millionaire Democrat, striding confidently into the throng, shouting to be heard over the banjos.

To my surprise, the families did more than tolerate him--they actually seemed to like him.  ...  He smiled broadly when he saw the Bluegrass Brothers huddled together, playing for scores of fans.  ... Warner clapped along for a few beats, but he didn't pretend to be a fiddle buff.  The point was that he knew the music mattered to them, and to those voters, that seemed to say a lot about the man.

So, as a lesson to '08 hopefuls, Southerners don't want you to pretend to be one of us.  We don't want you to want to be from a "slave state." That legacy isn't something we boast on our resumes or brag about at dinner parties.  And we don't want you to say "y'all" if it fits your speech pattern like pants you wore five years ago.  Rather, we want you to have plans to address the many problems rampant in the South and across the nation.  Folks everywhere can relate to that kind of talk.