Presidential Hopefuls Stick to Stump Speeches

EXETER, N.H.--Former Sen. Paul E. Tsongas always seems to be drinking water. And he always does it during his campaign speeches.

"Think of the water in this glass as the fossil fuel in the world," he says. "We drink deeply of this supply," he adds, taking another sip.

Suddenly, he takes a big gulp and guzzles the rest of the water. He turns the glass upside down, and explains how the world is running out of fossil fuels.

"There will be a generation that will not survive," he concludes, dangling the empty glass ominously in the air.

A hush settles over the room. The audience is awed.

Little did they know that Tsongas had used the same water gimmick countless times. He was giving his standard stump speech.

Perfected, seasoned, and at the end of a campaign trail, cliched antics like Tsongas' are characteristic of all the presidential hopefuls.

Even President Bush, who kept a limited campaign schedule in this state, did a little stumping of his own.

During his campaign stops, Bush always sits on a wooden stool in the middle of the room. During the course of the speech, the president spins around, addressing different parts of the room.

The idea, perhaps, is to emphasize that Bush is reaching out to the American people as he says he is in the speech.

The president's challenger Patrick J. Buchanan used a stump speech full of military imagery, calling on voters to "send a message" to President Bush.

"Today, from dawn until dusk, the Buchanan brigades met King George's army all along the Manchester-Nashua-Concord line," he said in his victory speech.

Where Buchanan uses aggressive rhetoric, Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton relies on charm and a folksy pitch to the middle class.

"For the first time in 17 campaigns, for three straight days, I had people coming up to me crying," said Clinton.

"The hits that I took in this election are nothing compared to the hits the people of New Hampshire are taking every day."

Clinton's stump includes frequent references to his financial aid proposal and, of course, the middle class tax cut.

While other candidates speak regularly on a variety of issues, Nebraska Sen. Bob Kerrey focused on what he sees as the campaign's defining issue--national health care.

"I've run the risk of being a single issue candidate and I make no apologies for that," Kerrey said during a campaign stop.

His call for national health care is almost always followed by an emotional talk about his service in Vietnam--where he lost a leg and won a Congressional Medal of Honor.

Kerrey says he hopes to build a country where "the doctor says `where does it hurt' and not, 'how you're going to pay.'"

Sen. Tom Harkin also emphasized his wish to "build" in his emotional stump speeches. He wants to build the nation's infrastructure, to "build a new America."

He says he is "the only real Democrat," a choice and not an echo, and calls for "a candidate who can take on George Bush and whip him."

"We need a clean break with Reagan-Bush trickle down economics," Harkin says.

The most flamboyant stump may be that of former California Gov. Edmund G. Brown, who prefers white turtlenecks to dress shirts and grassroots politics to Washington.

Cultivating an image as an "outsider" instead of a "run-of-the-mill" politician, Brown invariably refers to the corrupt political system and mentions his toll free 800 number.