Business Insider‘s Michael Brendan Dougherty and National Review‘s Katrina Trinko notice Mitt Romney is suddenly using the “l word” to describe Barack Obama and his policies. A sampling BI provided from Romney’s speech in Michigan.

• President Obama chose to apply liberal ideas of the past to a 21st century America.  Liberal policies didn’t work then, they haven’t worked over the last four years, and they won’t work in the future. … “
• Old-school liberals saw a problem and thought a government-run program was the answer. Obamacare is the fulfillment of their dreams. …
• Liberalism once taught that unions would ensure lasting prosperity for workers. …
• The liberals of the past raised taxes, often with little thought of how they would hurt small business, and the economy. …
• Old-school liberals envisioned government guiding and providing every need of every citizen. …
• What does it say about the fiction of old liberalism to insist that good jobs and good schools and good wages will result from policies that have failed us, time and again?

Liberalism is consistently tied to the past, contradicting the Obama campaign slogan “forward.” Dougherty says Romney uses the word liberal more than twice as much in this speech as in his address to the Conservative Political Action Conference.

You can overdo it, however. I remember watching Bob Dole give a campaign speech on television in 1996. Dole went after “liberal Bill Clinton.” Getting a lackluster crowd reaction, he shouted, “Liberal, liberal, liberal Bill Clinton!“