Stump speech (politics) Stump speech (politics) A political stump speech is a standard speech used by a politician running for office. Typically a candidate who schedules many appearances prepares a short standardized stump speech that is repeated verbatim to each audience, before opening to questions. The term derives from the early American custom in which candidates campaigned from town to town and stood upon a sawed off tree stump to deliver their speech. In presidential campaigns in the United States, a candidate's speech at his or her party's presidential nominating convention usually forms the basis for the stump speech for the duration of
The American Political Tradition The American Political Tradition The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It is a 1948 book by Richard Hofstadter, an account on the ideology of previous Presidents of the United States and other political figures. Hofstadter's introduction proposes that the major political traditions in the United States, despite contentious battles, have all "... shared a belief in the rights of property, the philosophy of economic individualism, the value of competition ... [T]hey have accepted the economic virtues of a capitalist culture as necessary qualities of man". While many accounts have made political conflict central, the author proposes that