A politician who takes an unapologetic and upbeat stand based on what he or she
believes to be deep principle.
Now a cliché, the phrase was made famous in a nineteenth-century William Wordsworth poem. William Safire noted that Franklin Roosevelt used it in a speech nominating New York governor Al Smith for president in 1924. But it has been most closely associated with former Minnesota senator and vice president Hubert Humphrey, who earned the nickname in the 1960s for his adherence to liberal causes and his now-anachronistic embrace of what he called “the politics of joy.”
Since then, the tag has been applied to politicians of both parties. In his 2012 reelection victory speech, President Obama described his running mate Joe Biden as “America’s happy warrior.” More recently, Republican aide-turned-lobbyist John Feehery used it to praise Louisiana Rep. Steve Scalise, who was just elected majority whip in the aftermath of Rep. Eric Cantor's primary defeat. “He is a doer, not a whiner,” Feehery wrote of Scalise.
But it can be used derisively, as when Democratic senator Robert Byrd sneered at President George W. Bush’s declaration aboard an aircraft carrier that things were going smoothly in Iraq: “President Bush typified the happy warrior when he strutted across the deck of the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln a year ago.”
Sometimes politicians use it to describe themselves. “I’m just a happy warrior,” House Speaker John Boehner told reporters in September 2013 shortly before the House voted not to fund the federal government unless Obama’s Affordable Care Act was delayed or defunded. Needless to say, Boehner was considerably less happy following the battle that took its toll on House Republicans’ overall popularity.