One of my favorite founders. Bit of an elitist, but as previous posters mentioned he was considerably more attuned to where America was heading than his peers. He was in many ways the first "Big Government" liberal in that he was the first major figure in American politics to recognize the need for an active central government that could respond to the issues surrounding industrialization. This was something others (such as Jefferson) failed to grasp and it's a strand of thought that can be followed through to Henry Clay's American System/Whig Party, Lincoln's Union government, the Progressives, the New Deal and the Great Society. Plus he wasn't a slave-holding racist either, so bonus points there.
I hope you're not suggesting that Hamilton in any way had more of a meaningful connection to modern liberalism than Jefferson and the Democratic-Republicans had ... He would be grilled alive for his views on business interests (so would Lincoln) by today's Democrats...
This is where we need Mechaman badly. He emphasized the why as much as the how and the what. You are right, Hamilton had a very nationalist view as well as a pro-business one, his policies were framed in the context of both empowering the US as nation and doing so by advancing the interests of its most elite members of society who were the natural source of leadership and so forth in his view. He may have wanted a stronger central gov't and his views (and those of Clay) may have attracted the support of working class voters in some circumstances, that hardly makes them anything remotely resembling a liberal by almost any definition.
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