Stump orator
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
A "stump orator" is a term for a politician who is ready to take up any question of the day, usually a political one, and harangue upon it from any platform offhand.
From this has also evolved the journalistic trick of describing a politician as "stumping" around his constituency at election time, conflating the tree stump s/he leaps upon at every opportunity, and the slightly rougher verb of "stump" as opposed to "walk" or "stride".
This article incorporates text from the public domain 1907 edition of The Nuttall Encyclopædia.
