Even with Democrats, Hillary Clinton is still working to build trust

Kerry Gooch is the executive director of the Kansas Democratic Party, but even he couldn’t resist.

Told Tuesday that there was a problem with the printing of the letter “H” in Hillary Clinton T-shirts the campaign ordered, Gooch chirped right up:

“Was it crooked?”

Gooch was joking, but his quip speaks volumes about the challenge before the Democratic presidential nominee: She can’t shake the impression that Americans don’t trust her.

In a New York Times/CBS News poll this month, 67 percent of voters said they did not consider her honest. A recent ABC News/Washington Post poll showed that 72 percent viewed Clinton as “too willing to bend the rules.”

She’s lucky in one regard: Voters feel largely the same way about Republican nominee Donald Trump.

So how do Democratic delegates justify nominating a candidate with such a glaring shortcoming — and one that’s so elemental to the job of president of the United States?

It’s the companion question to the one we asked last week in Cleveland of Republicans: How can they nominate a candidate for the presidency who’s so broadly viewed as racist?

For many Democrats, their answer amounts to, well, a non-answer. These Democrats say simply that she’s not as bad as Trump. Others dismiss the issue, insisting that Clinton has earned the nation’s trust based on her decades of public service, which they believe meet the test of time.

Stacey Newman of Missouri is one of those. The St. Louis County state representative, who is also a Clinton delegate, points out that Clinton also often ranks as the most admired woman in the world.

“How can you be the most admired and also be one of the most untrustworthy?” Newman said. “It doesn’t jibe in my world.”

Clinton delegate Sarah Starnes of Kansas City insists that too few voters know Clinton and that’s made it tougher for the nominee to fight back against a decades-long narrative that has painted her as suspect and unfit to serve.

“They’ve thrown so much at Hillary Clinton and none of it stuck,” she said.

Except an image that you can’t trust her.

Starnes is right on one point. Scandals, or purported scandals, have dogged Clinton and her husband since before they arrived in the White House. Remember Nannygate? Travelgate? Whitewater? Filegate? How about the death of Vince Foster?

Bill Clinton misled the country on Monica Lewinsky, so when Hillary Clinton insisted she knew nothing about it, some wondered.

Or more recently, when Bill Clinton met with Attorney General Loretta Lynch on an airport tarmac in Phoenix, Republicans, and a few Democrats, went into orbit. Many suspected there was a connection between that meeting and the FBI’s announcement a short time later that it would not pursue charges against Hillary Clinton for her use of a private email server to conduct State Department business.

“Trust is the glue that holds our democracy together,” Clinton said recently. “I take this seriously, as someone who is asking for your votes, and I personally know I have work to do on this point. A lot of people tell pollsters they don’t trust me. I don’t like hearing that, and I’ve thought a lot about what’s behind it.”

She admitted to mistakes, but she also pointed to political foes who have been unrelenting in their attacks.

“You know, you hear 25 years’ worth of wild accusations, anyone could start to wonder,” Clinton said.

The younger Bernie Sanders delegates in the Missouri delegation are more upfront about their concerns on trust.

Sara Shaffer-Henry of Independence expects to vote for Clinton in November. But she admits to struggling with the trust factor, especially as it relates to her stands on issues such as gay rights and the Iraq War. Clinton has admitted that her support for the war was a mistake, and she was a late convert on gay marriage.

All candidates evolve on issues, Shaffer-Henry said, but Clinton seems to do it most often “when it’s convenient.”

Brandon Baker of Raytown agreed: “There’s a problem when you flip-flop so much your credibility goes down.”

Getting past the trust factor remains “really tough,” Baker said.

Democrats are working overtime to address the issue this week in Philadelphia. But there’s that thing about trust: Once it’s questioned, that’s awfully tough to overcome.

This story was originally published July 26, 2016 at 3:17 PM with the headline "Even with Democrats, Hillary Clinton is still working to build trust."