She asked voters to trust her instincts, reciting an old saying she learned in the Methodist Church.  “Do all the good you can, for all the people you can, in all the ways you can, as long as ever you can,” she said.  She asked them to trust in her compassion. “To drive real progress, you have to change both hearts and laws,” she said. “You need both understanding and action.” She asked them to trust in her own resilience. “More than a few times, I’ve had to pick myself up and get back in the game.”  It was a speech that embraced her undeniable strengths in a topsy-turvy campaign against a wily and unpredictable rival: She had the thick skin and pressure-tested personality to be commander in chief. Her opponent, she said over and over, did not.  “Donald Trump can’t even handle the rough-and-tumble of a presidential campaign,” Mrs. Clinton said. “He loses his cool at the slightest provocation.”  That message of maturity, Democratic and Republican campaign operatives said, could prove decisive.  “For those voters on the bubble,” said David Axelrod, a former strategist and adviser to President Obama, “I think that is a tiebreaker in this election.”  In her nomination acceptance speech, Hillary Clinton ended the Democratic convention on notes of unity throughout the party and the nation, and took time to revel in the weight of the moment.  But in a conspicuous absence, Mrs. Clinton chose not to touch on her biggest vulnerability: the belief, widely held by voters, that she is a calculating and dishonest figure.  Even her closest allies acknowledge it is a perilous reputation she may never dispel. “It’s a tricky piece of business, how she addresses this,” Mr. Axelrod said. “There is no set of words that can entirely resolve these issues.”  Poll after poll shows that a startlingly wide cross-section of voters simply do not trust her: 67 percent of registered voters in a New York Times/CBS News poll this month, many of them wary of her inconsistent explanations for using a private email server when she was secretary of state.  So Mrs. Clinton is asking for trust of a different kind.  The strategy rests on the proposition that voters are capable, in the words of Stuart Stevens, a longtime Republican strategist, “of holding contradictory thoughts in balance.”  “With her, you can have real doubts about her, but you can still trust her to be a president,” he said.  A persuasive role model: her husband.  Bill Clinton successfully confronted a similar dilemma in 1992, when he asked voters to distinguish breaches of trust in his personal life from the faith he asked them to place in him as their next president. Trust in my vision for the country, he said, no matter what you think of my marital infidelity.  At his convention 24 years ago, Mr. Clinton faced down his damaged reputation with striking directness, quoting a young voter who had approached him at a campaign event and bluntly asked him, “Why should I trust you?”  His response then was much like his wife’s is today: to persuade voters that he could be trusted, above all, to battle tirelessly on their behalf.  On Thursday, Mrs. Clinton vowed to be a champion of the overlooked and overworked. “I will carry all of your voices and stories with me to the White House,” she said, in an echo of her husband’s famously empathetic style.  “What the campaign wants,” said Paul Begala, Mr. Clinton’s chief strategist in 1992, “is for people to move away from this position that she is fundamentally dishonest, to ‘She made a mistake there, but I trust her to fight for me.’ ”  Mrs. Clinton had ample help in Philadelphia. Throughout the Democratic convention, a procession of big-name speakers reached, one by one, for ways to attest to her trustworthiness, often in highly personal terms, and beseeched voters who are skeptical of Mrs. Clinton to take them at their word.  Michelle Obama vouched for her as a mother of two young women. “I trust Hillary Clinton to lead this country,” Mrs. Obama said, “because I’ve seen her lifelong devotion to our nation’s children, not just her own daughter, who she has raised to perfection.”  Senator Tim Kaine, Mrs. Clinton’s running mate, testified as the father of a Marine. “I trust Hillary Clinton with our son’s life,” he said.  And a retired general, John Allen, stood up for her as a former commander of United States military forces in Afghanistan. “We trust in her judgment,” he said on Thursday night, surrounded by fellow generals, admirals and veterans. “We know that she, as no other, knows how to use all instruments of American power, not just the military, to keep us all safe and free.”  The message was not subtle. And that was deliberate.  John D. Podesta, the chairman of Mrs. Clinton’s campaign, said in an interview that the aim was to portray her as someone who, when politics gives way to the serious business of governing, can be counted on. “A person who, when the doors close and the cameras are off, people trust,” he said.  For most presidential candidates, trust is not a flaw to be fixed, but a quality to exploit or a rhetorical device to deploy.  For George W. Bush, who lacked gravitas and a deep résumé when he sought the presidency, it was a way to recast inexperience as humility. “If you give me your trust,” he said at his convention in 2000, “I will honor it.”  For Mitt Romney, whose vast wealth and business tactics risked alienating voters, it was a chance to see him in a new, less menacing light. He was, he told his convention in 2012, “deeply moved by the trust you have placed in me.”  Those men asked the country to trust in them — just as Mr. Trump has urged voters to trust him alone to fix what ails the nation.  On Thursday night, Mrs. Clinton rejected that argument, promising, “We will fix it together.”  Her message: Do not trust her alone. Trust “us.”
Besieged by lingering doubts about her honesty, Mrs. Clinton made the case for a more pragmatic faith in her motivations, experience, temperament and priorities.