...The great American campaign speech is obviously hard to pull off and, for the readers among us, now hard to find. Students no longer stand before classrooms and recite the hallowed words of past office-holders and -seekers, and the small volumes of political speeches that once lined every American library – I cadged some splendid ones when Dartmouth's Baker Library disposed of its collection 35 years ago – are a thing of the past.

 Thus the offerings in Michael A. Cohen's Live From the Campaign Trail meet a need. They also help to define a genre worth paying attention to, since politicians speak differently from the stump than they do from their desks in the Senate or from the Inaugural podium. Campaign rhetoric in its more memorable forms, as Mario Cuomo once noted, is more poetry than prose, aiming at the heart instead of the head... LINK