Word: stumps
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...government on foreign policy but also because the leaders of others counties will know that I've got family members that live in small villages in Africa that are poor so I know what they're going through." It is an argument he has made in most of his stump speeches lately, as he tries to show that his judgment trumps the years of foreign policy experience of men like Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who led us into the war in Iraq. In an effort to underline his foreign policy credentials, Obama called a foreign...
...gets really hard. A bleak, windy Sunday morning in Fort Dodge, Iowa. The local roads are ice. As John Edwards enters the community-college cafeteria, his campaign workers are picking up rows of chairs--to make sure the media don't shoot the empty seats. Edwards trudges through his stump speech--the least engaged I've ever seen him--and specifically asks the sparse gathering for questions about the issues he considers important: health care, global warming, poverty, the economy. There are none such. The questions are odd, off point. A Native American accuses Hillary Clinton of saying something outrageous...
...next stop is better, but not much better, and there are several more stops after that. Edwards' passionate, populist stump speech reminds you that his greatest strength as a trial lawyer used to be his closing argument. But this is Iowa, where all closing arguments are being delivered to hung juries. Even the people who support Edwards aren't so sure...
...That a stump speech could have such power would seem unlikely in an age when the lingua franca of politics is scripted in 30-sec. commercials by media consultants and pollsters. But the resonance came from Edwards' own life story as the son of a millworker who grew up to be a spectacularly successful trial lawyer and then a U.S. Senator. "I beat 'em, and I beat 'em again, and then I beat 'em again," Edwards would declare. "How many times has someone said to you that you can't do something? That you're not quite prepared for this...
...This week he unveiled a new, softer stump speech that talks of "America rising." As he explains, "Having laid the foundation of some differences that we have on substance, now it's my job to assure that [voters] know exactly what I want to do as President, which is what I was doing in the last three weeks last time." In other words, the moment has arrived once again. It's time to make another closing argument...