ASHINGTON - When will the label ''sore loser'' stick?
The question is in the air, it is on some Democrats' minds, and it has been raised by GOP partisans who wave ''Sore-Loserman'' signs as Al Gore soldiers on.
Gore says he is optimistic that the Florida Supreme Court, which hears his appeal this morning, will authorize further manual recounts that could deliver the state, and hence the presidency, to him.
But at some point - this week, in two weeks, next month - somebody's going to concede. And if he can't get the result in Florida reversed, Al Gore will be the loser - sore if he says the election was stolen, good if he fades gently out of the picture - with all the personal, cultural, and political baggage that the loser tag carries.
''The loser is the loser, period. The public has a mentality that winning is the only thing,'' said Richard Lapchick, director of the Center for the Study of Sport in Society at Northeastern University. ''It's an unfair designation, but finishing second doesn't count anymore.''
A Los Angeles psychologist, Robert Butterworth, agreed. ''In America, the real `F' word is failure,'' he said.
Of course there are millions of Americans who don't believe Gore lost, and winning the national popular vote has given the vice president the will and the justification to fight on. Gore could end up in the company of Andrew Jackson and Grover Cleveland, presidential candidates who won the popular vote, lost the Electoral College, and came back four years later to capture the White House.
''It's maddening - just outrageous! - that you work your head off, you win it, and then you're told, `Sorry, you don't make it to the White House,''' Michael S. Dukakis, who ran for president and lost to Bush's father by 7 million votes in 1988, said when asked about Gore's plight.
''What is it like to lose? The answer is lousy,'' said Dukakis, who now teaches at Northeastern. ''But this is different. Gore won. I feel worse about this than my own loss.''
The presidential candidate's personality has a lot to do with how he will manage a defeat. Adlai Stevenson and Jimmy Carter were anguished by theirs. Presidents Gerald R. Ford and George Bush and Senator Bob Dole were publicly much more adroit at getting over the loss and on with their lives.
''Given the effort, energy, and money these men put out, nobody, privately, is a graceful loser,'' said Robert Dallek, a historian at Boston University. ''Publicly, most of these candidates say nice things, get out of the eye of the storm, go home, lick their wounds, and find something useful to do. Eventually, they enter into statesmen status.''
George W. Bush, of course, can return to the job of Texas governor. He also has the kind of extroverted personality that would make him less prone to the brooding, soul-searching, and second-guessing that would probably afflict the more introspective Gore, said Aubrey Immelman, a psychologist who studies personality in politics at St. John's University in Collegeville, Minn.
''Gore will take a loss very hard,'' Immelman said, adding that at two other difficult times in his life - when he enrolled in divinity school after serving in Vietnam and when he wrote a book in the wake of his son's severe injuries in a car accident - Gore became reflective and almost reclusive.
If Gore loses, he could model himself after another Democrat, Samuel J. Tilden, who in 1876 won the popular vote but lost to Rutherford B. Hayes in the Electoral College in what most historians say was a rigged balloting. Tilden, the governor of New York, slipped quietly and graciously into obscurity, a historical asterisk who never pursued the allegations of fraud - or political office again.
Robert Reich, who served as President Clinton's labor secretary, says that is an unlikely course for Gore. A man groomed for the presidency, who ran in the 1988 primaries, and who was Clinton's understudy for eight years, ''would not find a loss easy to accept,'' Reich said.
''Gore will probably feel the election was stolen, and that may fire him up to try again,'' said Reich, who now teaches at Brandeis University. ''I doubt very much he will give up his quest.''
But some Democrats, Reich included, were disappointed in the vice president's campaign. If Bush becomes president, Democrats might be looking for an alternative in a 2004 rematch. The way Gore handles the next few days or weeks could also be a factor in whether he remains a viable presidential prospect.
''If Gore fights on too long, to the point when a victory is just untenable, he will undermine his own credibility,'' said Immelman, the psychologist.
Gore is close to being perceived negatively by the majority of Americans. In a poll conducted for NBC News on Monday, 48 percent of the respondents said Gore's appeal of a state court ruling that denied further hand recounts was the mark of a sore loser. While 47 percent said they still had doubts about who won the White House, 63 percent said Bush would be the next president, and 59 percent said Gore should concede.
''I think Gore's got one more week, and if this fight goes beyond that, he risks getting the image of a guy who's too hungry for power to know when to quit,'' said Patrick Reddy, a Democratic pollster in California who studies presidential winners and losers.
Bad sports are not hard to find in history. Jackson was so upset about the House of Representatives choosing John Quincy Adams over him that he refused to extend his right hand to the new president-elect. Nixon, who did not contest his narrow loss to John F. Kennedy in 1960, famously remarked that ''you won't have Nixon to kick around anymore'' after he lost the California governor's race two years later.
Sports, which provides so much context for the culture and so many metaphors for politics, is hard on losers, Lapchick said. Basketball greats Oscar Robertson and Wilt Chamberlain were considered losers when their teams didn't win championships, and the Buffalo Bills got the same reputation for being the best in their conference but losing four Super Bowls.
''Somehow, we moved away from winning isn't everything to winning is the only thing,'' Butterworth, the psychologist, said, paraphrasing a famous line used by former Green Bay Packers coach Vince Lombardi. ''It's bad enough for athletes. It's worse for politicians who don't have support groups or self-help books on what to do when you fail.''
