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.
What has bugged me so much about the Bushco and overall Republican rhetoric in this campaign is that so much of it is in the future tense, and so little is in the past tense. And, as a perfect complement to this, Democrats seem to be avoiding the future tense and what they are going to do, instead relying on what the incumbents are doing now and have done in the past.
This really needs to change. The Democrats should spend most of their time talking about what they are going to do or not do, and the Republicans need to spend at least some time talking about what they have done or not done. Otherwise, the Republicans get a free pass for the debacle of their regime, and the Democrats do not present a clear choice to the voters.
As usual, it is the press who has failed us on this, and I include the blogosphere. Even in Daily Kos, it is very difficult to keep our attention focused on the Republican past and the Democratic future. Yes, it's hard work, but someone has to do it. Even though it may result in reports that are longer than a few seconds, there really are connections among different events, there are causalities there, and predictions.
You could think of it as a kind of horse race, a tired old nag of a political analogy. If you are trying to make a rational decision between a familiar horse who has raced many times before and a newcomer, it would be absurd to focus mostly on claims about the future by the older horse's owners, when you can examine the record. For a new horse, obviously there is no record, so you need to pay more attention to the claims about training, ancestry, how the horse looks and acts before the race, and so on.
What makes the matter even worse is that when the Republicans do talk about what they have done (as Bush did a little bit yesterday), they can lie and misrepresent their record with little fear that anyone in the press will call them on it (pace several authors of excellent diaries here that tore apart his speech). In the mainstream press, the source of information for the great majority of voters, the focus remains on the future of the Republicans, and, yes, the past of the Democrats; almost no one responds appropriately to the inherent differences between incumbent and challenger.
I don't really know what can be done about this, but since the current hot topic is diaries telling the Democrats what to do to win this fall, I thought I'd run my idea about grammar and tense up the flagpole and see if anyone salutes it.
Take the poll in the present.
Greg Shenaut