mayoral hopeful Mario Procaccino coined the term "limousine liberal" to describe incumbent Mayor John Lindsay and his wealthy Manhattan backers during a heated 1969 campaign. Historian David Callahan says that Procaccino: 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. In particular, Procaccino criticized Lindsay for favoring unemployed minorities, ex. blacks and Hispanics, over working-class white ethnics. One Procaccino campaign memo attacked "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. They preach the politics of confrontation and condone violent upheaval in society because they are not touched by it and are protected by their courtiers". 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."
Later use
In the 1970s, the term was applied to wealthy liberal supporters of open-housing and forced school busing who didn't make use of either of these themselves. Jimmy Carter's later-decade presidential visits to New York City's then-devastated South Bronx in 1977 followed by his next year's visit to Los Angeles' Watts neighborhood's Labor Action Committee's Senior Citizens Nutrition Center in 1978, both with promises of better lives for these neighborhoods' residents, were both seen by at least some people as more examples of limousine liberalism as those neighborhoods got worse afterwards until the mayoral administrations of mid-1990s Republican successors, respective Rudolph Giuliani and Richard Riordan. In Boston, Massachusetts, supporters of busing, such as Senator Ted Kennedy, sent their children to private schools and lived in affluent suburbs. To some South Boston residents, Kennedy's support of a plan that "integrated" their children with blacks and his apparent unwillingness to do the same with his own children, was hypocrisy. By the late 1990s and early 21st century, the term has also come to be applied to those who support environmentalist or "green" goals, such as mass transit, yet drive large SUVs or literally have a limousine and driver. Sam Dealey, writing in The Weekly Standard, applied the term to Sheila Jackson-Lee for being "routinely chauffeured the one short block to work--in a government car, by a member of her staff, at the taxpayers' expense." The term was also used disparagingly in a 2004 episode of Law & Order by Fred Thompson's character, Arthur Branch, to criticize the politics and beliefs of his more liberal colleague, Serena Southerlyn. South Park's creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone poked fun at the tendency of some liberals to be more concerned with image than actually helping the earth in the episode "Smug Alert!". The New York Observer applied the term to 2008 Democratic presidential candidateJohn Edwards for paying $400 for a haircut and, according to the newspaper, "lectures about poverty while living in gated opulence". In 2009, the term was applied by some commentators to former Senate Majority Leader and then-Obama cabinet appointee Tom Daschle for failing to pay back taxes and interest on the use of a limousine service. Critics of Bernie Sanders pointed out his use of private jets, ownership of three homes, and millionaire status as being hypocritical to his stances against inequality and global warming.
