Limousine liberal

Historian David Callahan says that Procaccino: conjured up an acid image of hypocritical wealthy dogooders insulated from the negative fallout of their bad ideas.

[1]It was a populist and producerist epithet, carrying an implicit accusation that the people it described were insulated from all negative consequences of their programs purported to benefit the poor and that the costs and consequences of such programs would be borne in the main by working class or lower middle class people who were not so poor as to be beneficiaries themselves.

[2] One Procaccino campaign memo criticized "rich super-assimilated people who live on Fifth Avenue and maintain some choice mansions outside the city and have no feeling for the small middle class shopkeeper, home owner, etc.

[3] The Independent later stated that "Lindsay came across as all style and no substance, a 'limousine liberal' who knew nothing of the concerns of the same 'silent majority' that was carrying Richard Nixon to the White House at the very same time.

[5] The New York Observer applied the term to 2008 Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards who paid $400 (equivalent to $590 in 2023) for a haircut and, according to the newspaper, "lectures about poverty while living in gated opulence".