During the years of Kuomintang rule, which governed Taiwan after it was handed over from Japan in 1945, KMT leaders were commonly thought to be mainland transplants who kept a distance from the people and remained unaware of the challenges they faced in their daily lives. Now, not even eight years after the DPP has replaced the KMT as our ruling party, it appears the tables have turned, and it is the DPP that has fallen out of touch with ordinary people.

Nothing illustrates this phenomenon more than the harsh way top leaders have handled a series of recent heckling incidents. DPP leaders who once prided themselves on their folksiness and humble backgrounds now appear all but sick and tired of hearing complaints from the people. President Chen Shui-bian, the self-declared "Son of Taiwan" who rose from a poor farming family to become a famous lawyer and national leader, has now abandoned any pretense of being close to the ordinary man.

Last week when President Chen attended an exhibition of domestically produced high-fidelity audio equipment, a man approached him and loudly declared, "the people will soon be unable to live!" The president didn't offer much of a reaction to the emotional heckler, saying only that he respected differing opinions that commonly occur in a democratic society.

But soon afterward, President Chen angrily announced that unlike his KMT predecessors, he would not train gangsters like Chen Chi-li and dispatch them to "whack" people like the protester. The president was referring to the late Bamboo Union leader Chen Chi-li, who in the 1980s was sent to the United States by intelligence officials to assassinate Chinese American author Henry Liu after Liu had published a biography harshly critical of then President Chiang Ching-kuo.

After President Chen returned to his office, he told a group of visitors that Taiwan's economy was clearly doing quite well, since the man who claimed the people could hardly live still had the spare time and money to buy a ticket to a hi-fi stereo exhibition. On the same day, Vice President Annette Lu got an earful from a market pork vendor, who complained that rising prices and inflation had left her virtually unable to earn a living. After Vice President Lu left the market, she told reporters she had received "intelligence" confirming the vendor was deliberately planted by reporters eager to fabricate negative news stories.Later, when President Chen was making a visit to Kaohsiung, a red-shirted protester shouted slogans demanding his ouster. He responded by saying he didn't even fear the Chinese Communist Party, much less the anti-Chen redshirts, and ordered his critics to stop harassing him.

The president has since been confronted by hecklers on other occasions, including during a visit to a school and a medical facility. Each time the hecklers are spirited away by security officers, the president has publicly chided his critics and reaffirmed his own sense of self-righteousness. According to our outspoken president and vice president, all of their critics are either agents of the opposition-dominated press, dolts or just plain wrong.

We do understand that leaders of all political stripes cannot abandon fundamental policies simply because they have been confronted by hecklers. However, we are quite surprised at the abrasive and harsh way that our leaders have dealt with these incidents. While heckling is rather common in other democratic countries, foreign leaders are almost always gracious enough to quickly brush away their critics and continue their original itineraries.

U.S. President George W. Bush, who has frequently been heckled during public speeches and gatherings due to the controversial U.S.-led war in Iraq, has never publicly lashed out at his critics with such abrasive and angry words. Even when an anti-war student spit in the face of the former U.S. President Richard Nixon in the early 1970s, the controversial American leader merely wiped off his face with a handkerchief and continued making his way to where he was going.

In contrast, President Chen and Vice President Lu have abrasively snapped back at their critics by accusing them of being plants, hacks and idiots. The fact that President Chen and Vice President Lu have responded to critics long after being confronted also proves they are truly upset because ordinary people have the nerve to heckle them. While the DPP had formerly prided itself on its close connections to ordinary people, these days it is clear that President Chen and Vice President Lu have been infected with the same kind of elitism that brought down the KMT.

The DPP's nominee for next year's presidential election, Frank Hsieh, should be careful not to follow the bad example being set by incumbent leaders, lest the ordinary people decide to fight back by denying him their votes.