YOUR OWN MAN SAYS SO!

By JEFF GREENFIELD

Let's get this straight. Most Americans say the president and his wife aren't telling the truth about Whitewater, they don't believe the White House story about the FBI files and they think Clinton lacks the honesty and trustworthiness to be President.

And Clinton is clobbering Dole in the polls.

Puzzled? Confused? Outraged? Maybe I can explain this by taking you back to the streets of New York City in the 1950s, where games of stickball were played on city streets with a lamppost for a foul line and the bumper of a '52 Ford for second base. When disputes broke out, as they did every three or four minutes, there was never an umpire to settle things. Instead we relied on an unwritten rule known as "Your own man says so!" If a player admitted that, yeah, his teammate was out, that was it.

In American politics, there are few more powerful factors than the your-own-man-says-so rule. Genuinely undecided voters are often so taken with a break from partisanship that they pay such dissidents special attention. When the New York Herald Tribune, which had helped found the modern G.O.P., picked L.B.J. in 1964, it was a stunning symbol of moderate-liberal disaffection. When AFL-CIO President George Meany refused to back George McGovern in 1972, it signaled the disaffection of blue-collar Democrats. In 1980 I became convinced that Reagan would win big--not by the polls, which were then showing a close race, but by Reagan endorsements from onetime antiwar Senator Eugene McCarthy and from a former leader of Tammany Hall, the home of the old New York Democratic machine.

This rule also explains why every incumbent 20th century President who has been seriously challenged for renomination winds up either losing or retiring. Independent voters tend to be shaken by votes of no-confidence coming from within the President's political home.

So far, at least, President Clinton has been spared this burden. He is the first elected Democrat since F.D.R. not to face a serious primary challenge. Nor have Democrats taken up the charge that Clinton is ethically challenged. In sharp contrast to the bipartisan outrage over Watergate and Iran-contra, the Whitewater hearings broke down completely along partisan lines. This may help explain why most voters seem to be treating the affair as too embroiled in political wrangling to affect their votes in November. But that is also why the FBI files story has at least the potential to cause real political damage. If Democrats with a passion for civil liberties come to believe that top White House officials were abusing the privacy of their political opponents, that could be enough to persuade them that their own President does not deserve to remain as Chief Executive.

It's become a commonplace to note that voters treated Bill Clinton in 1992 the way Wall Street treats a stock. They discounted his womanizing and his dissembling about the draft because they liked his energy and intelligence, and the fact that he wasn't George Bush. So far, at least, voters also seem to be discounting the insistence of his foes that Clinton's character renders him unfit to retain the presidency. If some of his own men begin to make that case, however, it's a whole new ball game.