Here's a nice piece by Michael Kinsley about how Democrats shun the "L" word.."L" as in "Liberal." I especially liked this paragraph…
You would not know from the Democrats' three decades of defensiveness about themselves and the label liberal that the Democratic candidate got more votes than the Republican one in each of the past three presidential elections. Another way of putting this is that the candidate the world labeled a liberal, whether he admitted it or not, got more votes than the candidate who proudly labeled himself a conservative.