Actually, I don't know. Do you?
Every now and then someone asks me who wrote my sig line, and I actually don't know, so I decided to write out the long version of the answer, and when people ask in the future I can just post a link to this.
This is my sig line:
Politics is like driving. To go backward, put it in R. To go forward, put it in D.
It's a quote; I didn't write it. I wish I could come up with a gem as clever as this! But I don't have a credit on it because I don't know who did write it.
Pretty soon after I started posting regularly, I decided I wanted to add a sig line to my profile, so one day I set some time aside to look for a cool one. Since it was an election year, I decided on a political sig, instead of a song lyric, a general philosophical statement, or something from my spiritual tradition.
When I first found the "put it in D" quote, Tom Harkin had said it at his Iowa Steak Fry. Apparently Harkin says it all the time.
But as I searched around to see if Harkin was the author, I saw that lots of other people have said it also. It's apparently an old Democratic chestnut that is invariably quoted at Jefferson-Jackson dinners and gatherings of state delegates and caucus organizing meetings and wherever old school Dem politicians congregate.
Hillary Clinton likes to say it.
John Lewis has said it.
Joe Lieberman quoted it in a book he wrote about the 2000 election (I won't link to him!).
You can get a bumper sticker with it.
And no one ever gives anyone credit for the line.
When I first picked this sig back in 2004, the oldest references attributed it to Harry Truman, although in a long time of looking tonight I have not found a single Truman reference anywhere! (I think my wording is slightly different from his.) Still, I like the idea that it might be a Truman quote, because Truman is associated with a lot of classic political one liners:
Suppose you were an idiot, and suppose you were a Republican... but I repeat myself.
If you want a friend in Washington, get a dog.
If people have to choose between a real Republican and a Democrat who acts like a Republican, they'll vote for the real Republican every time.
How far would Moses have gone if he had taken a poll in Egypt?
It's amazing what you can accomplish if you don't care who gets the credit.
My choice early in life was either to be a piano-player in a whorehouse or a politician. To tell the truth, there's hardly any difference.
I never give 'em hell. I just tell the truth and they think it's hell.
But Truman could have repeated "put it in D" from something he heard someplace else, and now no one remembers the original source because Truman was such a famous political figure. For example, Truman said that he was not the author of "If you can't stand the heat get out of the kitchen" even though everyone now thinks of it as one of his quotes. Sometimes I wonder if all the cool political quotes of that era are attributed to Truman whether he said them or not!
I'm very attached to my sig and it gets lots of positive comments from people as they see it for the first time. It's the only sig line I've had in all the years I've been here. Sometimes I add stuff before or after, but it is my personal political motto now, and at this point more people probably associate the saying with TrueBlueMajority than with anyone else. (Google certainly does!)
If anyone out there is the kind of person who researches this kind of thing for a living, and you ever find proof that Truman (or anyone else) is the first-use author, please drop me an email.
If anyone else fells like telling where their sig line came from, I love reading that kind of dK story.
And if anyone else wants to use my sig line as their own, feel free! It's not "mine" -- you don't have to ask my permission and you won't be stealing it from me. Besides, it's an important political truth and I'd like to see it publicized as widely as possible.