For months, President Obama has said he doesn’t want to hand the keys to the economy back to the Republicans. At a fund-raiser in Austin, Tex., on Monday, he repeated a punch line he’s begun using recently, comparing the political parties to the gears on a car.
“You want to go forward, what do you do? You put it in ‘D.’ When you go backward, what do you do? You put it in ‘R,’ ” he said, according to the Washington Post.
He added, “I’m just sayin’ that’s not a coincidence.”
The comparison seemed so obvious, perhaps even too obvious. In fact it was so ripe for the picking that it’s hard to believe that no Democrat had used it before — or had they?
Back in May Iowa’s Democratic governor, Chet Culver, told the same joke, reported Yahoo News. Mr. Culver said that “all you need to know about who to vote for you learned in driver’s ed: Put the state in ‘D’ to go forward or in ‘R’ to go backwards.”
But the joke goes even further back. BarryPopik.com traced it to the 2000 election, when the driving analogy was an oft-used battle cry for Al Gore’s presidential bid.
During the Democratic National Convention that year, Senator Tom Harkin, Democrat of Iowa, said “All you ever needed to know about this election, you’ve learned from driving. If you want to go backward, you put it in R. But if you want to go forward, you put it in D.”