It was Barbara Mikulski, outgoing ultra-liberal Democratic Senator from Maryland, in 1970 at a conference at the Catholic University of America regarding “Ethnic Americans”. The (code word) was “ethnic”.

She parlayed that into a House election out of her largely Polish-American neighborhood, then to the Senate where she sold out her Polish-American neighborhood just like the folks she decried in 1970.

She is a microcosm IMHO of how the Democrats lost their base.