AFTER AN ELECTORAL LOSS, sour grapes is a normal response. Few politicians are big enough to manage a nobler one. A political candidacy puts forward a set of ideas about how a decent society ought to be run; a political defeat hands power to people who don't share the losing candidate's goals, and may not even understand them. That is why politicians so often react to defeat with outright incomprehension. Al Gore's rampage through the legal system in hopes of overturning the election of 2000--as if his defeat were some kind of bureaucratic misunderstanding--was only a particularly dramatic product of the kind of incomprehension that is common among unlucky politicians of all parties. Witness Republican bellyaching in recent years about how Democrats win by "scaring voters" about Medicare--as if the question of whether voters ought to be scared were immaterial.

It would be comforting to view the strange press conference held last Wednesday by outgoing Senate majority leader Tom Daschle--in which he blamed Rush Limbaugh and other talk-show hosts for inciting hatred--as an instance of garden-variety sore-loserdom. But the charges Daschle flung indicate something more serious: an anti-democratic arrogance that looks increasingly like a bedrock principle of the Democratic party.

Daschle claimed that Limbaugh had, willy-nilly, incited "threats" against him. His proof was that Limbaugh had criticized what he took to be Daschle's partisan obstruction of popular legislation. "When I was accused of being an obstructionist," Daschle said, "there was a corresponding, a very significant, increase in the number of issues that

"You know," Daschle mused, "we see it in foreign countries and we think, 'Well, my God, how can this religious fundamentalism become so violent?' Well, it's that same shrill rhetoric, it's that same shrill power that motivates. . . . And that's happening in this country. And I worry about where over the course of the next decade this is all going to go. . . . Let's just pray--and I mean pray--that it doesn't get to that point."

Daschle's disingenuousness and hypocrisy are startling. First, Limbaugh ranks rather low on the calumny scale compared with certain of Daschle's fellow Democrats. We cannot think of a Republican equivalent of Alec Baldwin's urging, at the height of the Lewinsky scandal, that impeachment manager Henry Hyde be stoned to death. Nor can we recall any Republican commercial with nearly the potential to incite hatred as the Democratic ads run in the 2000 campaign cycle warning that black churches would burn if Republicans were elected. And of course Daschle wasn't warning his fellow Democrats against indulging in hate speech. He led into his tirade about conservative talk radio by expressing his hopes that Democrats could learn to imitate it. ("We were just talking with some experts a couple of days ago about how, if we're going to try to break through as Democrats, we have to have the same edge that Republicans do.")