By Kenneth T. Walsh; Matthew Cooper; Jerelyn Eddings; Paul Glastris; Jim Impoco; Missy Daniel 

President Clinton's peace mission to the Middle East last week did not impress Bob Tetreault. The Framingham, Mass., electronics technician says nothing can change the fact that Clinton is weak, liberal and untrustworthy. "His budget spends more than it takes in," says Tetreault, 38, a political independent who supported George Bush in 1992. "Health care reform would have bankrupted the country, and the military is at half strength." More important, adds Tetreault, "You can't trust anything the fellow says. He's got a reputation as a liar." 

        Other presidents have attracted plenty of antipathy. The gangly Abraham Lincoln was compared to an ape, Americans mocked Herbert Hoover's promise that prosperity was just around the corner, and a famous New Yorker cartoon showed a group of fur- draped swells heading for a Trans-Lux theater to hiss Franklin Roosevelt. The Vietnam War cost Lyndon Johnson his presidency and his reputation; Watergate sent Richard Nixon to his helicopter in disgrace. 

        New index. But Bill Clinton's America is the world's lone superpower; it is at peace, and its economy, if not thriving, is at least growing. Even so, a new U.S. News poll shows that while Clinton's approval rating has rebounded a bit to 48 percent, he still has a serious problem. An unprecedented index of voter attitudes toward him was derived from five questions in the poll: favorability, job approval, performance on the economy and on foreign affairs and whether he should be re-elected. It reveals that fully 20 percent of the nation's voters fall into the category "Clinton haters," 25 percent dislike him and 17 percent have mixed feelings. Clinton can count only 14 percent of the electorate as "Clinton lovers" and 24 percent more as "likers." 

        The news is not all bad for the White House. Congress is also held in low esteem, and no potential Republican candidate for president, such as Sen. Bob Dole, inspires much enthusiasm. And 52 percent of voters now say they approve of Clinton's handling of foreign affairs -- previously a big liability. 

        But voters don't care much about foreign policy, and they still fault Clinton's handling of domestic issues. Only 44 percent approve of his management of the economy; only 39 percent say he has helped reduce crime and illegal drug use -- two raging concerns. And no policy success is likely to change the minds of the Clinton haters. "Clinton has carried a permanent negative with him throughout his term in office," says Democratic pollster Celinda Lake, who conducted the survey with Republican Ed Goeas. "That [negative] group has had an intensity and verbalization few presidents have seen." 

        Some of the anger at Clinton is ideological, fueled by the perception that he is a big-spending liberal. What's new is that much of it is intensely personal, fueled by the belief that the president is a libertine and a liar. House Republican leader-in- waiting Newt Gingrich of Georgia has dubbed Clinton Democrats "the enemy ofnormal Americans," citing Clinton appointees Roberta Achtenberg of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, who is a lesbian, and Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders, who has advocated widespread sex education. The most virulent Clinton haters charge that Hillary Rodham Clinton holds the real power and blackmails her husband. 

        Ironically, says historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, rarely criticized as being out of the cultural mainstream, led a more libertine life in the White House than do the Clintons. FDR had an affair with Eleanor's social secretary, Lucy Mercer, and Mrs. Roosevelt had a deeply emotional relationship with journalist Lorena Hickok. But the ethos of the age protected the Roosevelts, says Goodwin, just as it lat-er protected John Kennedy, whose sexual adventures never made the newspapers. Today even unprovable assertions -- such as those leveled by Paula Corbin Jones in her sexual harassment suit against the president -- become major news. 

        The network. The attacks on Clinton also are amplified by an organized, technologically well-armed network of conservatives and Clinton haters who range from Arkansas businessman Cliff Jackson and televangelist Pat Robertson to talk-show host Rush Limbaugh. "Limbaugh is the spokesman for those of us who feel Clinton was suspicious to begin with and is becoming more so as scandals arise to show the defects in his character," says Ed Barber, the owner of Red's Seafood Restaurant in West Coxsackie, N.Y. The circulation of Slick Times, a publication that ridicules the Clintons, has grown from 12,000 to 125,000 in the past two years. "It was clearly a class-bound hatred for Roosevelt," says Goodwin. "With Clinton it's widespread and more coordinated." 

        But in some respects the president is his own worst enemy. His reputation as a waffler who tried marijuana but "didn't inhale," a dissembler who avoided the draft and a womanizer has made it easy to demonize him. Jack Woodyard, 71, who owns an industrial supply shop in Pittsburg, Calif., about an hour from San Francisco, voted Democratic all his life -- until Clinton ran for president. "It was a trust thing with me," says Woodyard. "I just felt he was lying about the draft and about the pot smoking." Drew Porter, an insurance broker in Montgomery, Ala., sums up the feelings of many Clinton detractors: "Bad rumors don't tend to follow good people." 

        Colleen Casey, a 34-year-old San Francisco lawyer and Republican, is disappointed that Clinton does not act more presidential. "He doesn't respect the office of the presidency and if he doesn't respect it, then how are world leaders expected to do so?" she asks. "He has to stop eating at McDonald's and telling interviewers what kind of underpants he's got on. I want a president I can respect." Adds Evan Davis, a bartender in Akron, Ohio: "I don't think anyone in the world respects us because of him." 

        "The visceral opposition to Bill Clinton is free-floating, not moored in ideology," says political scientist Stephen Hess of the Brookings Institution. "People who dislike him may actually agree with him on issues if they bothered to listen to him. It has to do with lifestyle issues, with the vibes he gives off." 

        Even good-natured comics such as Jay Leno, the host of NBC's "Tonight Show," find Clinton an irresistible target. Over the years, Leno told U.S. News, political humor has grown cruder as the population has grown more cynical, and Clinton bears the resulting burden of ridicule. "You have someone who is young, attractive and has sex appeal," Leno says. "Anytime it involves money or sex, there's great comedy there." 

        Joking matters. Leno argues that Clinton jokes would not work unless Americans had serious doubts about their leader. "You don't change anybody's mind with comedy," Leno says. "You just reinforce what they already believe." Leno often combines two themes sure to produce laughs: jokes about Clinton's undignified appearance and his image as untrustworthy. On his October 18 show, Leno said: "Yesterday, while Bill Clinton was shaking hands ... one of the kids said, `Boy, you have a big nose.' ... That kid thinks it's big now -- wait until he starts campaigning for re-election." 

        Clinton's propensity to overpromise and his eagerness to please have made matters worse. What most bothers 18 percent of the voters in the U.S. News poll is that he has not accomplished very much. Meanwhile, his readiness to compromise has eroded his image as a leader and branded him a typical politician. "I think Clinton might have been a good president if he didn't try to please everyone all the time," says Stuart Hennessey, 30, of Akron. "He's changed his policy on Haiti so many times. He punched Bush so many times on his stand on China, then he took human rights out of the trade agreement, which I thought was disgusting. He told homosexuals he'd put them in the military and then he didn't." 

        "The guy is not the person who ran for president. He's an entirely different guy ...," Limbaugh told U.S. News. "People are not idiots. They know that what comes out of the White House is disingenuous .... The days of the comeback kid are over. His behavior patterns are clear. People view him as dishonest." 

        And although it is not entirely his fault, Clinton's inability to deliver much of what he has promised, including his ambitious health care reform plan, has branded him incompetent, even in the eyes of allies. When Clinton's election was announced, Russell Bowden and his friends headed for San Francisco's Castro district, where gays and straights were pouring into the streets to celebrate. Now Bowden, 39, a ticket office manager for a theater, thinks Clinton has fumbled the gay rights issue. "They don't mind us paying tax dollars for B-52s so long as gays and lesbians don't fly them," he says. 

        Such disillusionment appears to be the prevailing view among the 25 percent of the electorate that dislikes Clinton. "He hasn't done anything to help me," says Candy Homonof, a 43-year- old independent from Newton, Mass., who voted for Clinton in 1992. Homonof, who was recently laid off from her job as a systems analyst, complains of Clinton's "general incompetence" and says his health care reforms would "break everybody." 

        Social upheaval. But Clinton's problem runs much deeper. As a president who promised change, he has become the lightning rod for the anger, resentments and fears of an angry and uncertain nation. True, he is not coping with a Civil War like Lincoln, a Depression like Hoover or an unpopular war like Johnson. But he is caught in the middle of a massive social upheaval, a running battle not simply between liberalism and conservatism but also between individual liberties and the need for order, between the remnants of the industrial age and the new postindustrial elite, between America's idealized past and its uncertain future. 

        The 20 percent of the electorate that hates Clinton is predictably conservative and resentful of big government: Fifty- eight percent of the Clinton haters consider themselves Republicans, 33 percent split their tickets and 9 percent are Democrats. Eighty-seven percent of them say government interferes too much in people's private lives. 

        What binds the strongest Clinton opponents together, the U.S. News poll found, is a sense that America's traditional family values are declining and that Clinton is a symbol of -- perhaps even a catalyst for -- the decay. Nine out of 10 Clinton opponents complain about a lack of moral leadership in government. Half the Clinton haters in the U.S. News poll say they are born-again Christians. 

        Anita Blackwell, a 40-year-old mother of five children from Mechanicsville, Va., opposes Clinton largely because of his support for abortion. Blackwell, who voted for Ross Perot in 1992, is troubled by what she considers an overall decline in values that Clinton seems to represent. "People just don't have the morals anymore," she says. 

        Although many homosexual Americans are disappointed in Clinton, Philip Litton, a 33-year-old California precious-metals salesman, thinks the president is "endorsing evil" by supporting gays in the military. "Here's a man who professes to be a Christian, yet his policies and personal behavior -- the extramarital affairs -- do not reflect a Christian point of view," says Litton. 

        Big government. Clinton's health care reform plan, meanwhile, identified him firmly with big-government answers to the country's problems, which are anathema to Clinton haters. "I feel worse about him than I did at the last election," says Bill Wallace, 44, who owns a consulting firm and lives in a suburb of Akron. "What he and his wife stand for has proven to be the biggest problem this country has: entitlements, welfare. ... Clinton has no clue. He's been on the public dole his entire life." 

        Keith Dixon of Beaufort, S.C., a 57-year-old semiretired businessman, usually votes Republican but isn't inflexible. Yet he says Clinton and the Democrats worry him because of "the ease with which they decide to impose regulations on Americans, to deny them freedom of choice in something as basic as health care." Dixon, a Navy veteran, was dismayed by Clinton's move to allow gays in the military. "His priorities are always off, it seems," Dixon says. 

        Hillary Rodham Clinton is a lightning rod in her own right. After surpassing her husband in popularity for months, Mrs. Clinton is now as polarizing a figure as her husband, with 48 percent of voters having an unfavorable opinion of her and 43 percent approving. Penny Ferguson, a 50-year-old retired San Francisco-area businesswoman, says she admires women such as Nancy Reagan and Jackie Kennedy who succeed quietly without telling others how to run their lives. Mrs. Clinton, she says, "has her sexes crossed." 

        But while 9 percent of the voters in the U.S. News poll are most troubled because Clinton is a "liberal," others say they still don't know what he stands for. "People still ask, `Who is this guy?'" says presidential scholar Thomas Cronin. "He wants to be both Franklin Roosevelt and Elvis. He wants to both raise taxes and cut taxes. He has a severe perception problem." That only reinforces the sense that Clinton is untrustworthy. 

        The deep doubts about his character make it harder for Clinton to deflect the doubts about his policies. Ronald Reagan weathered a storm of liberal anger and deep recession midway in his first term not only because his ideology was firmly fixed but also because even many of his political enemies had to admit they liked him. "You always knew where Reagan stood," says New Yorker Ed Barber. "Not so with Clinton." 

        The president initially thought he could win over his enemies, too; now, his advisers say, that confidence is gone. "There's this solid group of people who would vote against the president if Rin Tin Tin were the Republican nominee," admits a senior administration official. Unless Clinton can win over at least some of that 45 percent of the electorate that falls into the "dislikers" or "haters" categories, his next two years may be even rougher than the past two.

HATE HIM: 20 percent The middle-aged, Rocky Mountain state voters, veterans, homemakers and members of younger traditional households are more likely to hate the president; 90 percent bemoan the lack of moral leadership in government. Clinton haters include: 

        Jerry Falwell, who peddles tapes suggesting the president's opponents might be murdered; Rush Limbaugh, who says he might have a beer with Clinton but loathes his politics; and GOP leader Newt Gingrich, who calls Democrats the "enemy of normal Americans."

DISLIKE HIM: 25 percent


        Younger, married and better-educated voters held out hope for Clinton, but now 52 percent are disappointed and 39 percent are uncertain. They worry about morals, values and runaway individual freedom.

MIXED: 17 percent


        Voters with mixed feelings tend to be younger than those who like or love Clinton. They say they are hopeful (29 percent), uncertain (27 percent) or neutral (21 percent). Half of them voted for him in 1992.

LIKE HIM: 24 percent


        Singles, women and minority voters are among those who still like Clinton, but they are tired of business as usual in Washington. They tend to be populists.

LOVE HIM: 14 percent


        Clinton lovers include older, nonreligious and minority voters; Sidney Blumenthal, the New Yorker writer, and White House aide Bruce Lindsey.

[Chart information]: DO YOU APPROVE OF HOW CLINTON IS HANDLING HIS JOB?

YES 48 percent;  NO 46 percent;  UNSURE 6 percent

WHAT BOTHERS YOU MOST ABOUT CLINTON?

LACK OF MORAL LEADERSHIP 17 percent;  HEALTH CARE PROPOSAL 14 percent;  TOO LIBERAL 9 percent;  NOT ACCOMPLISHED ENOUGH 9 percent;  ALL TALK AND NO ACTION 9 percent;  NOT KEPT PROMISES 9 percent


WHAT DO YOU LIKE MOST ABOUT CLINTON?

TRYING TO BRING ABOUT CHANGE 43 percent;  FOREIGN-POLICY SUCCESS 11 percent;  HEALTH CARE PROPOSAL 9 percent;  IS A DEMOCRAT 5 percent;  STRONG LEADERSHIP 4 percent;  POSITIONS ON ISSUES 4 percent



HOW DO YOU FEEL ABOUT BILL CLINTON?

HOPEFUL 30 percent;  DISAPPOINTED 19 percent;  DISGUSTED 16 percent;  UNCERTAIN 14 percent;  NEUTRAL 9 percent;  ENTHUSIASTIC 7 percent;  ANGRY 5 percent