If you're running for office, you need a basic stump speech. And I don't mean you have to literally stand us up and speak without a microphone. That's what candidates had to do many generations ago these days. Ideally, you're gonna have a microphone speaker if you're speaking to a large crowd, otherwise, you might be speaking to three people in someone's living room and you're not going to need a stump or a microphone. A stump speech just means a political speech where you tell people why you're running and what you're going to do for them. You need to have something that you're comfortable with because you're going to be giving this speech, possibly hundreds of times.
And if you start long enough in advance, you may be given the speech 1000 times you need a speech that you feel comfortable with, that you believe in. That's interesting, at least the first few times you hear it now, if you've said it 1000 times, you might get bored with it. But your audience sure better find it interesting and you better act like you're finding it Interesting as well, gray political leaders understand it's not about what interests them. It is what's of relevance to the audience. Ronald Reagan gave virtually the same speech from 1964 until 1980, when he became the president of the United States or elected president, hit the same theme, many of the same examples again and again. The speech was effective wasn't necessarily interesting to him to say the same thing again and again.
But that was his best stuff. Larry King, if you've ever seen him give a speech at a convention he gives the same speech different from what you would hear him seeing his own hair, hear him say on his old cnn show, because he gives his best stuff that resonates with his audience the stories about his broadcasting career. So you need a stump speech, meaning simply a good speech that tells people who you are, why you're running. What you're going to do. them. So your homework is to come up with one shoot for five minutes, they're going to be campaign forums, where you may be given three minutes, you may be given five minutes, you may be given 10 minutes, you're gonna want to have a speech that has just a few main ideas where you can expand it or contract it based on the time allotted.
But you've got to get to the point where you're completely comfortable with this. The other candidates who are going with you, hearing you say it all the time may be rolling their eyes, they may be bored, doesn't matter, they're not going to vote for you. At least not based on what you're saying. And that speech for the 20th time, you've got to focus on your audience and treat every single audience as if it were the first time and last time you might ever have contact with them. And you've got to give them your best. And that's why you can't come up with a new speech every day.
If you get elected President of the United States and you're talking about different things. hotspots of different wars and crises around the world. Sure, you may have to give 10 speeches a day, all on different topics, all different words. Well, at that point, you've got a professional speech writing staff, dozen or so people. But right now you're a candidate. And no one really cares about your views on every single country in every single crisis in the world.
You've got to focus on the matter at hand, which is convincing people that you have the background, the integrity, the right positions, and the right policies that would make them want to vote for you for this particular public office. You're running for. So that's what you needed to stump speech. That's your homework. Now let's come up with a five minute stump speech where you introduce yourself to voters, tell them who you are. Let them know your number one concern.
You could only do one thing your first year in office, what would it be and what you Want to do for them? Come up with that right now.