He certainly has professed a good deal of this as well as dinosaur-throwback ambitious-Sixties stuff. However, the phrase just doesn't seem to fit the man. He is too chunky and is too clean-shaven to be a pinhead academic-activist kind of stereotype. He wouldn't quite be at home in Boulder (nowhere to go sailing, anyway).

That's how left-libs who consider him the Lion view his rhetoric.

Sounds like he was willing to be the posturer sometimes to keep the Dems' left wnig happy (bashing Bork with lies was beneath contempt but no doubt pleased those at the low tail of society's bell curve) while being a dealmaker largely behind the scenes.