Ever listen to religious radio stations? Noticed how many of the preachers have Deep South accents? (Thuh BAH-bull SAY-yuz ...")

It's curious how well that drawl sells above the Mason-Dixon Line. (A Texas twang works, too.) Something about those country-fried Southern vowels reassures Americans all over that the owner of the accent shares their values and intends to keep the world on a steady course.

What's this got to do with anything? Drawls and twangs happen to be the key to my theory of presidential politics: Rock, Paper, Scissors.

It's ridiculously oversimplified. First toss out all the sophisticated predictors commonly cited by political scientists: campaign strategies, money, organization, how many Americans think the country's headed in the right direction, unemployment, inflation, foreign menaces, etc.

With Rock, Paper, Scissors, only two things count: political ideology and Southern accent.

Here's how it works:

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Conservative candidate (scissors) always cuts Northern liberal (paper).
Centrist with southern accent (rock) always crushes conservative.

Trite, simple. It merely explains all the presidential elections since JFK's assassination.

Here's how it has played out:

• 1964: Lyndon Johnson vs. Barry Goldwater – Texas bedrock crushes right-handed scissors.

• 1968: Richard Nixon vs. Hubert Humphrey – razor scissors slices exuberant checkbook.

• 1972: Nixon vs. George McGovern – razor scissors shreds black-light poster.

• 1976: Jimmy Carter vs. Gerald Ford – Georgia sandstone crushes kindergarten scissors.

• 1980: Ronald Reagan vs. Carter – hedgeclipper cuts Kleenex.

(Wait! you say. Wasn't Carter a rock last time around? Yes, he ran as a centrist in 1976, and his Jaw-jah accent sealed the deal. But by 1980 he was perceived as an uncommonly wimpy liberal – prey of Tehran loonies and killer rabbits.)

• 1984: Reagan vs. Walter Mondale – hedgeclipper dices New Deal manifesto.

• 1988: George H.W. vs. Michael Dukakis – trimmer cuts comic book.

• 1992: Bill Clinton vs. George H.W. – folksy boulder crushes trimmer.

• 1996: Clinton vs. Robert Dole – folksy boulder crushes grouchy shears.

(Republicans tried but never did convince America that Clinton was a liberal, with him doing all that down-home Arkansas talk and crafty triangulating.)

• 2000: George W. vs. Al Gore Jr – tin snips cuts cardboard.
(Gore was technically a Tennesseean, but no one noticed, not even in Tennessee.)

• 2004: George W. vs. John Kerry: tin snips cuts Silver Star commendation.

There it is: all you need to know about the last 11 presidential elections.

Prior to 1964, Rock, Paper, Scissors doesn't work, because the political landscape was was still inhabitated by such now-rare species as liberal Republicans (Thomas E. Dewey, Dwight Eisenhower) and conservative Democrats (Harry Truman and, arguably, John F. Kennedy).

So what does Rock, Paper, Scissors portend for November?

Maybe nothing. The truth is, the past predicts the past better than it predicts the future. Change is afoot, if Barack Obama is to be believed, and America might again be traipsing into political terra incognita, as it did in the 1960s.

Four wild cards are in in play this year. Hillary Clinton's gender, Obama's race, Obama's charisma and John McCain's septuagenarianism.

The United States is plenty ripe for a black or female president. Still, McCain (Hanoi-honed shears) probably beats Clinton (paper cut). Her problem isn't that she's a woman; it's that she's Hillary, the very incarnation of brittle arrogance. But the country may like the idea of an eloquent, disarmingly sincere black man in the White House.

Yet other wild cards – huge ones, including social upheavals and three wars – haven't turned paper into scissors or scissors into rock for 40 years now. And I've noticed Obama doesn't speak with a Southern drawl.