Word: stumps
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...room, a 737, cruising from frigid Iowa to frosty New Hampshire, in a state of sublime shock. He had known that for him to rise, Howard Dean would have to fall, and even that might not be enough to win. He had already fired his campaign manager, retooled his stump speech and endured months of derision from party professionals for his dead-on-arrival campaign. He had ignored every piece of conventional strategy, decamped from his home field of New Hampshire, thrown everything at Iowa and held on tight. When the first results were coming in, he did not believe...
...your help." Hoarse from a cold, he planted his feet on the stage of the peach-and-cream Claremont Opera House with his hands in his pockets and an all but visible leash, to make sure he did not jab and roam and punch too hard. He cut his stump speech almost in half so he could take more questions, show more leg. And he started talking about his warts so much that even some of his Deanie babies asked him to quit...
Watching John Kerry circumnavigate the English language on the stump, I often think about the sparse clarity of his writing--and wonder why he is so much more compelling on the page than in person. Even now, after his victory in Iowa and surge in New Hampshire, the Senator manages to entangle himself regularly in grandiloquent and impenetrable rhetoric. There is a cardboard pomposity to it that drives his staff, the press corps--and a fair number of regular human beings--nuts. The people of Iowa had months to study Kerry, weed through his oratory, and finally came...
...crowd. "People have told me all my life that I couldn't do this or that--couldn't go to college, couldn't go to law school," Edwards often tells a crowd. "You've probably been told that too." The difference between John Kerry and John Edwards on the stump is simple: Edwards, the trial lawyer, is trying to convince a jury, and Kerry seems to be trying to convince history...
Clark's new stump speech has a quality not often found in political oratory: it is charming. He is able, somehow, to shed his brass and re-create his lonely, impoverished childhood in Arkansas: his patriotic attempt to master chemistry and build a backyard rocket after the Russians launched Sputnik; his decision, at age 5, to attend the Baptist church in Little Rock because the stained-glass windows reminded him of the Methodist church he'd attended in Chicago before his father died; his struggle to raise a family on a military salary; the car he totally rebuilt because...