CONVENTION '96: SITTING PRETTY

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There are politicians who specialize in being elected without being liked. Former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher of Britain is the leading example. Her take-your-medicine style of leadership did not require personal popularity. But the American electorate, unlike the British one, does not relish a spanking. And Clinton is certainly not a politician who is indifferent to popularity. His desperate, boyish eagerness to be liked by everybody is one of his most charming but least presidential attributes. So it is especially mysterious that Clinton, of all recent Presidents, should stand poised to win re-election without acquiring the widespread affection Reagan enjoyed and he, Clinton, wants so badly.

This is a mystery about us, not about him. A man as voluble as Clinton, who talks himself down to his underwear--the most famous person in a culture of celebrity and psychoanalysis--cannot remain an enigma for four years.

Enemy and friend alike feel by now that they have figured the man out. They don't even disagree that much on the diagnosis. All but the most poisonous enemies give Clinton at least some credit for his remarkable capacity for empathy, for his off-the-cuff eloquence, for his intelligence and sincere dedication to public policy. And he probably doesn't have a friend in the world who wouldn't concede, in private, his excessive appetites, his "slickness," his too-easy willingness to abandon people and principles.

But Clinton's enemies still wonder: How stupid can people be? How can the voters apparently see through this charlatan but go ahead and vote for him anyway? And Clinton's friends wonder: How ungrateful can people be? If Americans are content enough to re-elect Clinton, why do they hold him to a standard of character no successful politician could meet? Why won't they give him the kind of respect, if not adulation, a successful President in difficult times deserves?

There are explanations of varying degrees of persuasiveness. They come in flavors psychological, objective and political.

1. "COGNITIVE DISSONANCE"

That is how the fiercely anti-Clinton Wall Street Journal editorial page put it the other day, adding hopefully that this psychological condition "is an essential step in changing your mind." Put more crudely, Clinton's opponents simply believe he has got people conned: they should know he's a slime ball, but it hasn't sunk in. Back at the height of Reagan's popularity, voices like the Wall Street Journal labeled any such fancy-pants theorizing by Reagan's opponents--any suggestion that the people don't know their own mind--as "contempt for democracy." But that was then.

Clinton's supporters have their own cognitive-dissonance theory: Americans have been bamboozled by a vicious, well-financed conservative opposition, and by an unsympathetic press corps, into believing that Clinton is deeply morally flawed. But they support his policies and perhaps will come to reappraise him personally on the basis of his manifest desire to make life better for them.

2. HE'S A POLITICIAN, AFTER ALL