Who loses if Clinton wins.

Everybody is trying to figure it out. Approximately 57 per cent of the voters believe a) that Mr. Clinton and Mrs. Clinton have been hiding things, b) that their most intimate associates from days gone by either commit suicide, resign, get convicted, or are indicted, c) that back when Bill was governor, he did shady things with campaign contributions, d) that Hillary knew about all this and personally profited from legerdemain on the futures market, e) that the White House knew that confidential FBI reports were being brought in for unlicensed purposes, and f) that Mr. Clinton almost certainly has oversexed neurons, and underdisciplined self-control. Approximately 57 per cent then say that they will vote for him for re-election.

The pundits pore over these questions and seek refuge in the complicated character of the stories being examined. Vince Foster's papers . . . the billing records . . . the S&L in Little Rock . . . the conviction of the former associates . . . the trial of the next echelon of associates. Too complicated, it is said, and too boring. In fact I agree. I am bored by it.

If every one of the enumerated charges here listed were established (about some there is no doubt: Foster did commit suicide; Jim and Susan McDougal were convicted), I for one would not deprive Mr. Clinton of my vote if I approved his policies and the means by which he pursues them. Those who believe that past American Presidents or candidates were comparatively blameless bring to mind the statement of the professor from MIT, one of the commission dispatched in 1966 to survey whether the elections held in Vietnam complied with the law. Well, said the professor on returning to Cambridge, in answer to the question put to him by a reporter, "I would say yes, the elections over there were fair, just as fair as in Massachusetts."

True, Senator Dole hasn't comparable problems with his own past. If Solomon had the only vote, he would find for the challenger, not the incumbent.

What does hurt is the Elmer Gantry factor. Lyndon Johnson didn't really have Clinton's problem in part because everyone simply took it for granted that Landslide Lyndon was a political swinger. That's the way it works in Texas, most of the voters said to themselves. Everyone who cared to know such things knew that LBJ had made millions by exploiting his position to get from the Federal Communications Commission a television monopoly in Austin, Texas. How many people cared to punish him? Not many.

But Johnson was not a sanctimonious kind. He would burp into the microphone and exhibit his gallbladder scar and affix the presidential seal on his cowboy boots. Clinton attempts an entirely different vision of himself. He is the fresh idealist, the young scholar who turned to politics because of his attachment to such activity as a means of doing good for his fellow man. It is for this reason that the accumulation of character traffic-accidents catches attention. What then begins to make the blood run hot is his characterizations of others.

On Sunday, at peace with 60 Minutes, which told us that the last Mexican president's brother had a character problem inasmuch as he stole $300 million, viewers were treated to a television ad sponsored by the committee to re-elect Mr. Clinton. The message disclosed that it was Mr. Clinton singlehandedly who was protecting Medicare, sponsoring scholarships and tax deductions for college education, maintaining the school lunch program --frustrating Republican designs on the aged, the sick, the hungry, and the afflicted.

Sure, if a stickler had been around to make a few distinctions, the ad would have collapsed from the weight of its horse manure. (The Republican alternative to the Administration's Medicare program was to trim the projected growth by 4 per cent.) Mr. Clinton's programmers do not mention that at the rate at which entitlements are increasing, everybody will be broke some time soon after the turn of the century. Nor would they bring up such a datum alongside Mr. Clinton's ringing declaration in his State of the Union address that the age of big government is over.

What an American President says is most definitely a clue to his character; it is set against what that President does, and what he countenances. A close study of Mr. Clinton in office needs none of the material rushing in from Arkansas, congressional investigations, the FBI, the Justice Department, or Eleanor Roosevelt. His own record should dislodge the 57 per cent. If it does not, this voter would hazard the guess that the re-election of Mr. Clinton would not be a catastrophic setback for the United States, but it would gravely damage the pretensions of enlightened democracy.