Word: stumps
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...remarked-upon bloom of anger in his speeches, but it's petaled with irony. An example: the only person the pro-Dean left seems to hate more than President George W. Bush is Karl Rove, Bush's top handler. Dean knows this, so he mentions Rove in his standard stump speech, delivered dozens of times a week. But he uses Rove not just to inflame the activists but also to poke fun at himself. "The Danes," he says in a part of the speech on energy, "get 20% of all their electricity from the wind." The little-boy smile unfurls...
Politics in California has become a dismal proposition. The state is so large that most politicians have given up on the standard ceremonies of the stump. There is little human contact, few town meetings or door-to-door work; there are simply too many doors. The prevailing wisdom among consultants is that you run in California by raising a lot of money and putting it all on television. The public has reacted to these soulless exercises with disdainful apathy; Californians tend to be more interested when the state's nutty kernel of political extremists put some hot-button initiative-about...
Jaundiced views of the U.S. are a proven crowd pleaser in London. Michael Moore, the insurrectionist documentarian, got booed off the Oscar stage for criticizing Bush's foreign policy, but in London late last year, his one-man stage show--with bits like a nightly "Stump the Yank" quiz--was a smash hit. Even the American plays that are increasingly shoving aside Shakespeare and Stoppard on the West End (often with big-name U.S. stars in the cast) seem to be reveling in the worst of the U.S. In the current hit revival of David Mamet's Sexual Perversity...
...last week, French Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy promised more money for prevention and a special conference on the issue. Helene Véret has heard such earnest declarations before. The last big blaze to ravage their place, in 1990, turned a beloved 300-year-old umbrella pine into a stump. The Vérets made the best of it, using it as a natural bench for taking in the stunning view of the coast. This fire obliterated even the stump. The Vérets take no comfort in knowing that the view won't be what it was for years...
Kerry points out that he gave Bill Clinton the very same authority in 1998. But he has never found the simple, direct words to explain his vote, or much else, on the stump. He insists that his rhetorical style is judicious, diplomatic, presidential--a contrast not just to Dean, but also to Bush's occasional cowpoke eruptions. Rowdiness, however, could well be the coin of the realm this time...