Politicians have a way with words

WASHINGTON — It's that wonderful time of the year when I let our delightfully quirky politicians do my work, using their own words.

With the relief that the election is over palpable across the land, we nonetheless still ponder some of the — uh — more interesting lines of the year from our candidates.

At a rally in Center Point, Ore., a crowd awaiting Sen. John Kerry was wilting in triple-digit heat. Wearing sunglasses, many began dowsing themselves from their water bottles. Kerry, bounding on stage, greeted them: "You look like a band of beavers." Surely all 10,000 Oregonians there knew their state animal is the beaver. (Hard to believe Kerry lost.)

We're trying to stop quoting the president of the United States correctly in an effort to say what he meant instead of what he said. But this just slipped in. In Poplar Bluff, Mo., where he delivered a campaign speech on health care, President Bush complained, "Too many good docs are getting out of business. Too many OB-GYNs aren't able to practice their love with women all across this country."

Austrian-born California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, whose supporters would like to change the constitution so he might run for president, had an unusual put-down of legislators who balked at his $103 billion budget. "They cannot have the guts to come out there in front of you and say, 'I don't want to represent you. I want to represent those special interests: the unions, the trial lawyers.' . . . I call them girlie men." (He won!)

John Ashcroft, whose departure from the Justice Department is applauded by some and mourned by few, warned in June that he had intelligence that al-Qaida intended to "hit the United States hard."

This was the year former President Bill Clinton came out with a hefty, best-selling volume of his memoirs titled "My Life." He observed, "A lot of presidential memoirs, they say, are dull and self-serving. I hope mine is interesting and self-serving."

In June, Bush decreed that self-rule was to be returned to Iraq, seven months before Iraqis are being told to go to the polls to elect their leaders at the end of January. "Let freedom reign," he wrote.

Another time he said he sent "American troops to Iraq to make its people free, not to make them American. Iraqis will write their own history and find their own way." In a closed-door session with Republicans about transferring power to the Iraqis, he said it was "time to take the training wheels off."