What’s wrong in America today? What would you do to fix it? Today we share the winners of our third annual Student Contest. Hailey Cheng, Tigist Murch, and Vijay Damerla give us their minute-long pitch for what America needs. Political Science professor Dan Cassino weighs in on the tactics used in these three speeches, and whether or not they’re shared with the current presidential candidates.
To hear all the finalists, visit civics101podcast.org/contest.
Have a civics question? Click here to ask and we’ll do our best to answer!
Episode Resources and Lesson Plans
The Perfect Presidential Stump Speech: By the folks at FiveThirtyEight, two professional speechwriters demonstrate every trope for a surefire stump.
Address America: from the Constitution Center; A lesson plan about creating a stump speech in only six words!
TRANSCRIPT
NOTE: This transcript was generated using an automated transcription service, and may contain typographical errors.
Civics 101
Stump Speech: Student Contest
Civics 101 is supported in part by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:00:04] What is the biggest problem in America today? What would you do if elected the head of our democratic republic? In short, what's your stump speech?
Bernie Sanders: [00:00:15] -A government that works for all and not just the one percent.
Elizabeth Warren: [00:00:18] -but on your 50 millionth and first dollar you've got to pitch in. and one million first dollar. You've got to pitch in two cents.
Donald Trump: [00:00:26] -We are building the wall, 100%... 100% -
Nick Capodice: [00:00:33] That was the task for our third annual student contest and we received over 100 submissions from across the country.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:00:38] This is Civics 101. I'm Hannah McCarthy.
Nick Capodice: [00:00:40] And I'm Nick Capodice.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:00:41] And today we are bringing you the winners of our student contest.
Nick Capodice: [00:00:45] One of the only stipulations is that these stump speeches had to be a minute long. And we received a huge diversity of topics. We got gun control.
Student: [00:00:52] I would raise the age requirement for purchasing a gun to be at least 21 years old.
Nick Capodice: [00:00:56] Hyperpartisanship.
Student: [00:00:58] In America's political climate of polarization and even factionalism, that seems to reflect Dante's portrayal of Florence, unity as the most rational solution to our problems.
Nick Capodice: [00:01:06] And a lot about immigration.
Student: [00:01:08] Overall, I consider that the government should try and help the immigrants as much as possible.
Student: [00:01:12] Enforce Border Patrol and continued the border wall construction.
Nick Capodice: [00:01:15] And there are things that just plain work when it comes to these. The team at the Website FiveThirtyEight, they have a wonderful project called the "perfect presidential stump" speech where they lay out some tips like, "repetition can be good" or "always do things in threes".
Hannah McCarthy: [00:01:32] Yeah, and you're always supposed to say "this is the most important election of our lifetime." And yet, to end with "and it's not about me. It's not about this election. It's about- this other thing that I've been talking about."
Nick Capodice: [00:01:44] Right. So the entire Civics 101 team met and we deliberated at length, and then we finally voted, and we selected three stump speeches as this years winners. But we've put all the finalists on our website and you can listen to them at civics101podcast.org/contest.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:01:59] We didn't just want to air the speeches without understanding their broader political context. So we brought in someone who lives and breathes politics.
Dan Cassino: [00:02:11] Hi there Nick!
Nick Capodice: [00:02:11] Dan!
Dan Cassino: [00:02:11] I'm doctor Dan Cassino. I'm a professor of government and law at Fairly Dickinson University.
Nick Capodice: [00:02:18] Did you know he was a doctor?
Hannah McCarthy: [00:02:19] I didn't!
Dan Cassino: [00:02:21] You know Nick, scientists have been PHD's since the 12th century. Doctors only start being called "doctors"," medical doctors", in the sixteen hundreds. So we're the OG doctors.
Nick Capodice: [00:02:28] Well, that is a little news you can use. So Hannah and the OG Dr. Dan, let's do this! First contest winner Hailey Cheng from Arcadia High School, in California.
Hailey Cheng: [00:02:42] Giant corporations are responsible for the majority of global emissions, and they must be held legally accountable for their actions. When businesses make decisions about manufacturing, they do not consider the environment because they hardly feel the consequences. And if these companies can still make more profit by ignoring environmental implications, they will do so. Corporations should not get away with making a profit at the expense of our planet. We simply cannot stop the path of climate change if America does not take the drastic measures to regulate colossal corporations who are the brunt of the problem. Climate change is a threat on the planetary scale and a warrants a solution on the planetary scale. So as president, I would make sure big businesses are held accountable and uphold the government's ultimate responsibility to protect their citizens.
Nick Capodice: [00:03:41] All right.So, Dan, what do you think of Hailey Cheng's speech?
Dan Cassino: [00:03:45] So Hailey is really, I think doing something really smart, which is focusing on big corporations. When we talk about climate change, what we can do about climate change, we're talking at the individual level, right? "Well, don't throw out your plastic straw." But Hailey, I think, has gotten really at the heart of the matter, which is it's not individuals that are going to save the world from climate change. It is large corporations and governments. There has to be structural changes. She's also talking about, you know, though she doesn't use this terminology. She's talking about what economists have talked about for a long time. And that is the idea of "negative externalities." That is when somebody does something, if it affects somebody else, they should be made to pay for all those negative externalities.That's a really smart argument and one that is not just going to appeal to liberals, but also appeal to conservatives. I mean, this is Chicago school economists who are making these sort of arguments.
Nick Capodice: [00:04:30] Dan, are there any 2020 candidates that Haley reminds you of?
Dan Cassino: [00:04:35] Well, we have had candidates who were talking a lot about climate change. Michael Bennett, for instance...
Michael Bennet: [00:04:40] When I woke up this morning here, blossoms in my backyard were blooming a month before they should. That's the third or fourth year that's happened...
Dan Cassino: [00:04:49] But they haven't been able to get as much traction in the Democratic primary as candidates who either have more broader set of policy proposals.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:04:58] It's interesting, that climate change hasn't gotten all that much traction in this election because a significant number of our submissions featured that as like their primary focus.
Nick Capodice: [00:05:07] I think it was a greater percentage than any other topic of these submissions. Number two, Tigist Murch from Brewster Academy in New Hampshire.
Tigist Murch: [00:05:19] How is it fair that men get paid more money than women for doing the same job? Hi. My name's Tigist Murch. And here's why you should vote for me for president. I will personally take action to make sure there's equal pay by putting in place laws for women all around. Aren't you guys sick and tired of seeing the same thing? For example, the U.S. women's soccer team, thier salary is one hundred thousand a year, while the men's soccer teams base salary is 387,500 a year. Another example is in Hollywood. Men tend to make double what the women make. You can also see this in basketball players and hockey players. My plan will work. We pass a law and then penalize those who don't abide by the rules. Last but not least, women will finally get the equal pay they deserve. Poverty rate amongst working women will also go down. Vote for me as your president. I will bring this country what it needs. Equal pay for all. Just as it should have been from the beginning. Thank you.
Dan Cassino: [00:06:19] So Tigis is making a really focused case about gender equity and especially about equal pay for women.Now, it's not a bad idea to make an appeal to women because women, of course, are a majority of the electorate. So if you have to appeal to a group of women, there's not a bad group to be appealing to. A lot of the examples she gives of men being paid more than women for the same work are really potent. The idea that the U.S. women's soccer team doesn't get paid much as the men's soccer team, despite the fact that the merchandise makes more, more people watch them, they're actually good...
Whoopi Goldberg: [00:06:52] The Women's Cup. World Cup soccer final in 2015 was the most-watched soccer game in United States history for that. They get paid 38 cents on the dollar compared to mount players.
Dan Cassino: [00:07:05] And the most popular laws about trying to create equal pay for men and women are actually laws, regulations really that force companies to disclose pay. That is once you...once companies have to tell everybody, here's how much you're making here's how much everyone else in your office is making, once you do that, you're not telling companies what they have to pay. But you're rather empowering workers to go to their boss and say, hey, you're paying this other guy a thousand or ten thousand dollars a year more than I am? What gives? Also she does make one really cool linkage and that is the link to poverty. Most of the households that are in poverty are female headed households. So we got single mothers who are working and they're not being paid as much. And that forces them and their children into poverty. They would be, of course, much better off if they get equal pay.
Nick Capodice: [00:07:50] So Dan, have we heard any messaging like targets in the 2020 election?
Dan Cassino: [00:07:54] Sure. We actually have seen Elizabeth Warren talk quite a bit about gender equality and the way women are treated in the workforce.
Elizabeth Warren: [00:08:01] The game is rigged when women earn less than men for doing the same work. It's rigged when women can be fired for asking how much the guy down the hall makes for doing the same job.
Nick Capodice: [00:08:16] All right. Last but definitely not least from Arcadia High School in California, Vijay Damerla.
Vijay Damerla: [00:08:21] I think that the main idea of my presidency can be summed up in one word. Invest. My priority will be tackling the daunting enemy that is climate change, because we need to invest in our future. We need to reduce the carbon dioxide emissions immediately. One way would be to reinstate the Obama-era auto policy that regulates cars to 55 miles per gallon, while companies like Honda have agreed to continue this, even though it's not the law, others like Toyota have simply refused. We need to invest in gigafactories. And with just one hundred of these, the entire world's energy needs could be theoretically met. But only if we invest in it. We need to invest in renewable energies such as electric, solar, hydroelectric and wind. We need to invest in our middle class. We need to tax those above the one million dollar tax bracket at a very high rate because the top 400 Americans are richer than the bottom 150 million. That can't be the case. Now is the future and we need to start investing in it. Thank you.
Vijay Damerla: [00:09:37] So Vijay has some really good ideas, ones that are actually going to appeal to a large segment of the American population. A lot of what Vijay is saying is based on this idea of technological optimism, the idea that really whatever problem we have, we can invest and we can build our way out of it. We can find new technologies for whatever is the problem we're facing. And those new technologies will help everybody. And that's a really popular appeal because allows us to avoid tradeoffs, much same way that supply side economics for a long time let people say, oh, we'll cut taxes and raise revenue, we'll avoid the tradeoff. Technological optimism, let's say, well, this is a problem, but we don't actually have to fix it. We just have to give a bunch of money to very smart people and they'll fix it for us. Vijay makes a very strong appeal to inequality, saying, look, there are rich people who are not paying enough in taxes and we should tax them. And that feels like it should be a popular appeal in American politics because after all, most of us are not very rich people. But it turns out the American public doesn't actually like that argument very much. They don't like this argument that, well, rich people are, have too much money. So if you want to make the argument that we should tax the rich more and more progressive taxation system, it really helps to frame it in terms of equity. That is, rich people get all these tax breaks that you and I don't, or rich people should pay their fair share. And those appeals to equity do a better job of bringing everybody along on this idea of a more progressive taxation system.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:11:01] Dan, who does Veejay remind you of?
Dan Cassino: [00:11:03] Oh, Veejay sounds a lot like Andrew Yang, actually.
Andrew Yang: [00:11:06] Efficiency because trucks can convoy together and lower wind resistance. And so robot trucks really get places with less fuel.
Dan Cassino: [00:11:13] Andrew Yang is doing very much the same thing with the technological optimism saying we have to get rid of these old solutions and just bring in totally new solutions and trust in technology and science. We think that they can save us.
Nick Capodice: [00:11:27] All right. Thank you so much, Dan.. And even more. Thank you, Hailey. Thank you. Tigist. Thank you, Vijay.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:11:33] And to all who entered, it was the best part of our job to listen to these and the hardest part of our job to pick only three.
Nick Capodice: [00:11:40] Again, you can listen to all the finalist speeches at civics101podcast.org/contest. We're going to continue our series on political parties in our next episode. And to any educators out there. Be sure to visit our education page civics101podcast.org/info, where you can get free graphic organizers for each episode and join our new education newsletter, for our monthly digest of not only what we've been up to in the education world, but picks of our favorite civics and U.S. history lesson plans from across the nation.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:12:11] This episode was produced by you Nick Capodice with me Hannah McCarthy.
Nick Capodice: [00:12:14] Our staff includes Jacqui Fulton, Erika Janik is our executive producer and cutter of cloth and expressions like "chicago-style Economics".
Hannah McCarthy: [00:12:21] And you know what? It's not about Maureen McMurry. It's not even about this election. It's about something else.
Nick Capodice: [00:12:26] Music in this episode by Scott Granton, Scott Holmes, Audio Hertz and Rachel Collier.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:12:31] Civics 101is supported in part by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and is a production of NHPR. New Hampshire Public Radio.
