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. Even amid the glow of his primary victories last week, Clinton rather plaintively acknowledged that he had to do a better job of convincing voters he is an honest man. Some well-wishers go further. "Clinton is going to have to find some forum in which he confronts these character questions directly," says former Democratic National Chairman John White. He has in mind something like John F. Kennedy's televised confrontation with Protestant ministers in Houston that defused concerns about his Roman Catholicism -- and its supposed influence on his policies -- early in the 1960 campaign. Natalie Davis, a political-science professor at Birmingham-Southern College, draws a different analogy. Says she: "At some strategic moment in the fall, he's going to have to give a sort of Checkers speech ((referring to the 1952 TV talk by Richard Nixon, rebutting slush-fund charges, that saved his vice-presidential candidacy)), and it will have to be dynamite. The great thing is that Bill Clinton is totally capable of delivering it."
Maybe so. Clinton already has won the surprised admiration of many pols for surviving allegations that would long since have scuttled many another campaign. Yet for the candidate and his supporters, the massive mistrust he has aroused is maddeningly difficult to counter because it stems from so many sources. It can no longer be dispelled by refuting specific charges -- not all of which are terribly important anyway. There are some indications that more voters are troubled by allegations of adultery and draft evasion than will admit it to pollsters. But youthful experimentation with pot is a proven non- issue in the case of candidates who admit it straightforwardly; it had no effect on the 1988 campaigns of Bruce Babbitt or Albert Gore Jr. or the confirmation of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. And probably not 1 voter in 50 could even say just what are the questions that have been raised about Clinton's financial dealings.
Far outweighing any specific issue is the cumulative impression made by the sheer number of them. Says Mervin Field, conductor of the respected California Poll: "If it was just marital infidelity, ((voters)) might have excused that, but the cumulative weight of that and everything else is too much. The degree of uncomfortableness is increasing day by day." Even while endorsing Clinton last month, former President Jimmy Carter lamented that the "volume and repetition of charges against him have created an image that he's not $ trustworthy" -- most unfairly, in Carter's view.
Among political insiders too, the volume and repetition of charges have created a kind of shell-shocked wariness as to what revelation or pseudo- revelation might be coming next. There are indications that this fear is keeping Clinton from sewing up the nomination as early as he might have. It is not at all certain that the Arkansas Governor can win enough delegates in the remaining primaries and caucuses to give him the 2,145 votes necessary. To nail down the prize, he may eventually need a heavy majority of the so-called superdelegates -- basically elected officials and party bigwigs. But though the Clinton campaign claims the support of more than 200 of the 772 superdelegates, there was no rush among the remainder to jump aboard his bandwagon, even after his victories last week.