Democratic seducers and republican gropers.

FIVE days before California's recall election, the Los Angeles Times ran a front-page story laying out the complaints of six women against Arnold Schwarzenegger. The candidate stood accused of groping four women and making lewd suggestions at least twice between 1975 and 2000.

These revelations emboldened others to come forward to share their own memories. By the time I went to my polling place, I'd heard the stories of 15 women who said they had received some unpleasant sexual overture from Arnold.

The episode raises an obvious question: How is Arnold worse than Bill Clinton? The women's groups, Gray Davis, the left-leaning editorial pages--all of the people so disturbed by Arnold's behavior said as little as possible during Clinton's sex scandals. Why are they now so upset?

His personal behavior aside, everything Arnold has said and done suggests that, as governor, he will be more than friendly to the political causes championed by the very women's groups he has so outraged.

An argument can he made that Arnold is a more valuable political resource to women than Clinton ever was. There's not much a Democrat can do in the abortion debate, for instance, but when the biggest star in the Republican party is also a pro-choice, anti-gun social liberal and married to a Kennedy to boot, you have a recipe for social change. So: why the outrage?

Perhaps, as the feminist writer Katha Pollitt suggested the other day in The New York Times, there is a meaningful moral difference between Clinton and Arnold that favors Clinton. Pollitt wanted readers to understand that, in Clinton's case, the sex was consensual while in Arnold's, it was not. Clinton merely seduced; Arnold assaulted.

But Arnold, so far as we know, never actually had sex with the women who caught his eye. His interest appears to have been less in using his power to compel women to have sex with him than in humiliating them to make himself feel powerful. He was all about shock and awe.

And while Clinton was proven to have seduced a White House intern while serving as President of the United States, he stood accused --at least as plausibly as Arnold has been accused--of far more vulgar, unwanted overtures toward women. Pollitt ignored these.

A leading man seizing the bosom of a key grip on a crowded movie set may be politically and socially unwise, but it hardly belongs in the same sentence as a sitting governor using state troopers to lure someone to an empty hotel room. (Paula Jones' accusation against Clinton.)

And even that seems mild compared with calling a distressed political supporter into the Oval Office for a crude pawing. (Kathleen Willey's charge.) According to these allegations, Clinton didn't merely debase the women but also the office.

The more you think about it, the stranger it is, this desire of politically organized women to distinguish Clinton from Arnold. Arnold's alleged behavior was no more repellent than Clinton's. His political beliefs and actions do not appear to be any less female friendly--and in their practical effect will quite likely be more friendly. His only problem is his party affiliation.

We appear to have a new role in politics: a male Democrat can grope all he wants. A male Republican gropes at his peril. But with this bizarre new rule comes a bizarre new system of incentives. The effect won't be to drive gropers out of politics, it will be to drive them into the Democratic party.

Thus, gropers will naturally drift into the arms of the women who say they most loathe them. I wish them well together, but I can't help but wonder: can it last?

Michael Lewis is a columnist for Bloomberg News.