Rich Lowry, in an article titled, “Liberals? What liberals?” writes:
BOSTON — The union members here seem like liberals. The feminists seem like liberals. The black and Hispanic activists seem like liberals. But appearances can be deceiving, or so the Democrats hope to convince the public at their convention this week: “Liberals? What liberals? Nobody here but war-on-terror stalwarts and cultural conservatives.”
It must be particularly galling to committed liberals that some time in the past 30 years the natural word to describe them — “liberal” — became a political embarrassment, so much so that Republicans gleefully hurl it as an epithet, Democrats avoid it if they can, and it is sometimes known only as “the L-word.” Republican South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham shed light on this phenomenon a few Sundays ago when he challenged “This Week” host George Stephanopoulos to call him a conservative, begged to be called a conservative, and noted the Democratic ticket would never be so happy to be called liberal.
In a mirror image of Graham’s appearance, great liberal hope Barack Obama, the young black Senate candidate from Illinois, refused to say he was a liberal on a recent Sunday show. When liberal dinosaur Ted Kennedy was recently asked if John Kerry — who has consciously modeled his liberalism on the Kennedy family’s — is a liberal, he said he doesn’t find labels useful. This will be news to all the “reactionary right-wingers” denounced by Kennedy throughout the years.
It’s funny, I don’t know of a conservative who doesn’t mind being called a conservative–but few liberals like the L-word. I wonder why?
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