Mike Huckabee's white ethnic humor.
I just caught Chris Matthews on Hardball talking with Sen. Debbie Wasserman Shultz about a joke that Mike Huckabee made about how horrible the sound of Shultz's voice was. Matthews asked the obvious question: "What's so funny about Shultz's voice?"
He was asking Shultz and she responded that Huckabee must dislike a strong woman's voice. Chris let it go at that but I got the feeling that he didn't get the answer he was looking for. At least not the whole answer.
I think I know what he was getting at. Maybe it's just as simple as one southern white boy listening to another southern white boy talk and hearing what is actually meant. Or, simpler still, perhaps it's something widely understood but people hesitate to be the one to call it out.
In either case, here's my take.
When "good ol' Huck" cracks wise about how Shutz sounds, he's "poking fun" at who and what she sounds like. Shultz's accent is what "high-toned, white folk" used to describe as "ethnic." The honest translation of that term would be "Jew", more precisely: "Yankee Jew."
You see in Mike Huckabee's jokebook, the humor lies in the fact that Debbie Wasserman Shultz not only sounds like a "Yankee Jew Liberal, she really is a "Yankee Jew Liberal." The advantage here is that, since the Rev. Huckabee didn't come right out and say "Yankee Jew Liberal.", you can laugh at it without making the baby Jesus cry.
The word for this is Anti Semitic.