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California Representative Don Edwards held a meeting last week of 17 congressional Democrats who, like him, are superdelegates. They agreed, he says, that Clinton's nomination now looks inevitable but that nonetheless they would stay uncommitted at least for the moment. One reason, says Edwards -- who stresses that he personally has no doubts about Clinton's honesty -- is that "you always wonder if another shoe will drop." The situation has reached the somewhat absurd stage of rumors about allegations. Talk circulated around Chicago last week that some really damaging charges -- nature unspecified -- were about to become public, and it may have scared off some superdelegates from signing up with Clinton just yet.
Among both ordinary voters and political cognoscenti, a great deal of the uneasiness about Clinton reflects his propensity to dance away from straightforward yes or no answers to any character question. He relies instead on legalistic, artfully phrased and heavily nuanced replies that may be technically accurate but also misleading. The resulting belief that he is incurably evasive has probably damaged Clinton far more than any specific issue. It ties in with a not very specific but nonetheless widely felt discomfort about his calculated ambition (he says he has wanted to be President since he was a teenager) and some alleged shifts of position on policy. At least among some people, these factors create a general impression of insincerity, of a synthetic politician who will do or say anything to become President. In fact, 67% of those questioned in last week's TIME/CNN poll said exactly that: Clinton "would say anything to get elected President." That at least partly reflected a sour suspicion of all politicians; 60% voiced the same opinion about Bush.
Clinton's admirers put much blame for Clinton's woes on print and TV journalists who, in their view, have been harping on largely trivial questions of character while ignoring the policy issues that are Clinton's strength. Result: the voters who have heard about Gennifer Flowers vastly outnumber those who have any idea that Clinton has put forth a highly detailed program on taxes and the economy, let alone those who have any notion of what his program contains. There is some truth to this, but given public attitudes, it is largely inevitable. Political scientist James David Barber of Duke University observes that many voters say to themselves, "I don't really know what the deficit means. Ido know what adultery means."