Obama stood more firmly than he ever has, showing balls of steel

[Pretzel_Warrior]

75. It's etymology is thus: early 20th century socialists used it as

A rebuke of Communists who were more focused on party line rather than outcomes of policy.

In the early 70's it was picked up by the New Left as follows:

In the 1970s, the New Left had adopted the term political correctness;[5] hence, in the essay The Black Woman: An Anthology (1970), Toni Cade Bambara said that “a man cannot be politically correct and a [male] chauvinist, too.” In the event, the New Left then applied the term as self-critical satire, about which Debra Shultz said that “throughout the 1970s and 1980s, the New Left, feminists, and progressives ... used their term politically correct ironically, as a guard against their own orthodoxy in social change efforts”.[5][6][7] As such, PC is a popular usage in the comic book Merton of the Movement, by Bobby London, which then was followed by the term ideologically sound, in the comic strips of Bart Dickon.[5][8] In her essay “Toward a feminist Revolution” (1992) Ellen Willis said: "In the early eighties, when feminists used the term political correctness, it was used to refer sarcastically to the anti-pornography movement’s efforts to define a “feminist sexuality”"[9]

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_correctness

It was not used by conservatives in a perjorative sense until the early 90's