(FORTUNE Magazine) – The latest cant phrase in American politics is ''tough love,'' and in this item we aim to elaborate its roots and deeper meaning. Warning: The item could be ''tough going.'' Tough love's emergence in politics was initially descried by your servant in a New York Times editorial on the Big Apple's recent mayoral race. The race was won by Republican Rudy Giuliani, even though the editorial had excoriated him for lacking ''a balanced tough-love approach to civic problems.'' Hmm. What approach is that? And why wasn't it mentioned in our high school civics course? Turning to Nexis for guidance, we found 136 articles referring to tough love in the period since June 30. Perhaps half the articles referred to the familiar thought that young children need some combination of love and discipline. The other half were attempting to analogize that thought to politics, the usual context being one in which a pol is nobly telling somebody: This will hurt, but it's for your own good. Here, for example, is a National Journal article referring to Al Gore's reinvention of government as ''tough love for the federal bureaucracy.'' Here's a Washington Times item about a plan in the District to reduce welfare payments to families whose kids are chronic truants. Here are several stories about candidates whose idea of tough love is raising taxes. In one of them we learn that Jim Florio lost in the New Jersey gubernatorial race because of -- no, not walking-around money but voters' rejection of high-tax tough lovery. We now intuit that the New York Times' real grievance about Rudy was his talk of lowering taxes. Back in the Carterite Seventies, politicians justified the growth of the public sector by babbling about ''compassion.'' Now they are all looking at an electorate that feels overtaxed and no longer buys compassion. Will it sit still for tough love? We give the phrase four more months, six max.