Word: stumping
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...imagery, however, Babbitt has problems selling. With a bobbing and twitching face that folds all over itself, Babbitt seems as comfortable on television as a moose being pelted with buckshot. On the stump he is earnestly plodding and uncharismatic. Nor is his product an easy sell. His austere economic prescriptions are the political equivalent of bran flakes with skim milk: good for what ails the bloated body politic, but not the thing a liberal Iowa Democrat is likely to choose over the buttered and honeyed comfort food that others are promising. If Babbitt advances, it will mark an unlikely triumph...
...before. In 1984 he called a proposed design for a new wing of the National Gallery a "monstrous carbuncle on the face of a much loved friend." In the same speech he characterized a planned Mies van der Rohe office building in London's financial district as a "glass stump." Opening a factory last May, he likened the new building to a Victorian prison -- to the delight of the workers, if not of management. But last week Prince Charles swapped his sniper's rifle for a shotgun and took his broadest aim yet at Britain's architects and planners...
With three years of national campaigning under his belt, Gephardt is a practiced and polished performer, doggedly crisscrossing the country, prescribing tougher trade policies and heavier doses of education to bolster "human capacity" as cures for an ailing America. His stump speech is a stark sweet-and-sour concoction that warns audiences of inevitable economic decline because of surging foreign competition, yet promises a revitalized America. "I worry about an America where dreams don't come true," he tells Democrats in his earnest style. "Our country has sunk to a low, but we can make it great again...
...trouble capitalizing on the crisis or convincing undecided voters that he has the heft to handle troubled times. Despite his lengthy legislative scorecard and his earnest doggedness both in Congress and on the campaign trail, he remains a dispassionate figure who has sparked little excitement. On the stump in Iowa, he tells voters that they must choose the person they trust the most. But even as he works to personalize the race with a what-a-nice-young-man appeal, Gephardt remains the candidate in the plain vanilla wrapper...
Gephardt has personally adopted a more sensible tactic. He has begun using a ringing new stump speech with a no-fudging defense of his tough trade policies, and he has been attacking Simon and Dukakis directly on economic issues. Not only is it a more substantive way to revitalize his campaign, but it might prove more effective than his organization's botched poll scam...