NEWS ANALYSIS : Can-Do President Under a Can’t-Win Character Cloud : Performance: Clinton’s policy achievements are his best weapons against questions about his private ethics. But the past keeps intruding on the present.

WASHINGTON —  On the floor of the House of Representatives and in the clerk’s office of the Little Rock federal courthouse, Thursday was a day that encapsulated the central reality of Bill Clinton’s presidency: It is becoming a race between his achievements in Washington and his past in Arkansas.

In the House, Clinton won a narrow but dramatic vote to ban the sale and manufacture of assault weapons, a signal victory over one of the most fearsome lobbies in Washington. In Little Rock, meantime, a throng of 100 reporters awaited the filing of a lawsuit by a former Arkansas state employee who has publicly accused Clinton of sexually harassing her during his tenure as governor--a suit that her attorneys indicated they will file this morning.

The House vote highlighted Clinton’s strongest claim on the public: his success at moving key elements of his domestic agenda into law, despite the intense opposition of such powerful foes as the National Rifle Assn., which went all-out against the assault weapons ban.

The incipient lawsuit, on the other hand, underscores the apparently inexorable accumulation of questions about his character and ethics which represent the gravest threat to the President’s public standing.

Thus, events 1,000 miles apart on a single day framed the question that may ultimately settle Clinton’s political fate: Will the voters’ verdict on him turn on assessments of his private character or his public actions?

Across the political spectrum, few analysts are certain how voters will answer that question in 1996. But there is broad agreement that Clinton’s best hope of overcoming the persistent doubts about his character lies in continuing to deal successfully with the problems that Americans want government to address.

“If achievement isn’t the answer to the questions about his character,” says Democratic pollster Alan Secrest, “then there is no answer.”

In fact, as Secrest and others note, questions about Clinton’s character and record appear to be bound together in intimate complexity. In different ways, both supporters and critics argue that Clinton’s record on public issues reveals as much about his private character as the accusations about his personal conduct.

Echoing arguments made by presidential candidate Gary Hart after he faced accusations of marital infidelity in 1987, Clinton’s supporters maintain that he demonstrates his character by taking on tough fights and winning.

“The best thing you can do is to keep proving your character by delivering on the things you promised in the campaign,” says Paul Begala, a White House political adviser.

That contention clearly carries some weight with many voters. When Clinton wins legislative fights, it forces into focus the personal characteristics voters like best about him: his empathy, doggedness and commitment to confronting difficult issues.

“What happens by pulling off major legislative victories is it shows his effectiveness, and the sense that he is doing something about the agenda people care about,” says Democratic pollster Peter Hart.

But while those sentiments can offset the deeper anxieties about Clinton’s character that are rooted in questions about his past, they appear incapable of erasing them. In a poll Hart conducted for NBC and the Wall Street Journal this week, 64% of those surveyed said that they were only somewhat or not at all confident that Clinton had “the right set of personal characteristics to be President.”

Clinton is far from the first President to be dogged by allegations of impropriety.

Yet, as historian Arthur M. Schlesinger recently noted, Clinton may be the first to have his presidency so clouded by allegations concerning behavior that preceded his tenure in the White House.

Some allegations arising from the Whitewater controversy concern the White House response to charges of wrongdoing. But the vast majority of questions about the Whitewater real estate investment surround actions by Clinton and First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton during their years in Arkansas. Mrs. Clinton’s controversial commodities trading also took place about 15 years ago.

Even Paula Jones, a former employee of the Arkansas Industrial Development Commission, accuses Clinton of making an improper sexual advance in 1991--more than a year before he won the presidency. Clinton aides have flatly denied the charge.

People do not entirely shed their past when they ascend to national office: Spiro T. Agnew was forced to resign as vice president in 1973 in the face of evidence that he accepted kickbacks stemming from his previous government service in Maryland during the 1960s. But generally, there was less enthusiasm in the past than there is now about excavating a President’s actions before he took office.

“Think about Harry Truman and the Pendergast machine or Lyndon Johnson and his radio and television properties,” says Robert Dallek, a presidential historian at UCLA. “In the past, once the President got into office there’s been a tendency to pull a curtain down over his earlier career.”

Clinton’s narrow legislative victory on assault weapons was another brick in the wall his advisers are trying to build against the seemingly relentless tide of questions about the past. But they understand that if, as expected, Jones files her lawsuit today, those waves will grow higher--and the need for new bricks will be more urgent.