I wouldn't say a "penchant." I spent my "formative years" in the midwest followed by four years of undergrad at Vanderbilt in Nashville and then a few years dickin' around in Texas and then aback again to the midwest. So maybe it's nostalgia or the grass-is-greener sort of thing, but I do have a fondness for southern accents and I hate to generalize about southerners (or women for that matter). However, some of the South's finest that I encountered at Vanderbilt were very creepy. Imagine young-republican type Trent Lotts or Bill Archers, hyperintelligent fellas who don't take kindly to "yankees."
This all reminds me of a catachresis or freudian slip I heard recently: "the Manson-Nixon line."