"Liberal -> Progressive

link

When a political movement changes labels, that usually means its adherents are unelectable.

Take the Democrats in 2004. When the presidential candidacy of Massachusetts Senator John Kerry, a liberal protégé of the state’s senior senator, Ted Kennedy, went down in flames, their party almost immediately switched from the buzzword “liberal” to “Progressive.” Not only was this changing the subject, it was reaching for the latter term’s historically bipartisan connotations. The Democrat Woodrow Wilson had been adapting himself to a doctrine first put into circulation in national politics by a Republican, Theodore Roosevelt.

The initiators of the change in emphasis, Democratic consultants Paul Begala and James Carville, declared that the Democratic Party needed to reexamine itself. But then it turned out that the new label was only semantics. Four years later, Barack Obama, despite running from the center, showed that when off teleprompter (advocating spreading the wealth), he was very much in sync with his predecessor candidate. By the 2012 election, he no longer even donned the camouflage, but ran as an unapologetic liberal.