This is a fairly short diary, but it is based on something that has been bugging me a lot lately. Bush's speech yesterday put me over the top.
There are basically two ways a party and a candidate can approach an election: as an incumbent, and as a challenger. There is an important grammatical difference in the rhetoric that is appropriate to each type, as they speak about their own platforms.
A challenger is basically always in the future tense, because he and his party do not hold the seat currently and have not held it for some time. In other words, the challenger talks about what he is going to do.
The incumbent, on the other hand, is in a more difficult situation, because he must also talk about the present, and more importantly, about the past: what he has done during his incumbency.
