President Uses Summit to Aid GOP Campaigns : Politics: Malta is cited at three fund-raisers for Senate candidates. But Democrats may also gain from the easing in East-West relations.

Some have called his visit with Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev a “saltwater summit.” Others, President Bush said, may call it the “schmooze cruise.”

Whatever the moniker, just remember to call it a top-notch building block in his efforts to help fledgling Republican political campaigns.

About 72 hours after he returned from his weekend meetings in Malta with the Soviet leader, Bush was back on the road, turning the summit conference into a thing of political bravado.

The President spent Thursday and Friday at political fund-raisers for Republican Senate candidates in Texas, Colorado and Iowa. At each event, the summit meeting formed a central element of a new political stump speech.

No one among a group of White House aides, Democratic and Republican political consultants and political scientists interviewed this week would suggest that domestic politics played a role in the Malta meetings. But they agreed that the meetings can play a handy role for Bush as he turns to domestic politics in the approaching congressional election year.

“When you’re raising funds, what you want to show is success in the past and the promise of more in the future,” said one senior White House official, who described the summit meeting as offering the President a “tailor-made” opportunity to do just that.

Cut, then, to Denver on Friday, where Bush helped raise money for Rep. Hank Brown’s Senate campaign:

“At Malta, President Gorbachev and I took our first hopeful step into a new American-Soviet relationship. We took our first step toward the next decade and the new world that is taking shape--a new world of security and freedom.”

The meetings, he said, were “about the new kind of peace we aspire to. One that is rich with the promise of permanence. One that forms a foundation of freedom and democracy throughout the world.”

But, even as Bush touts the upbeat tenor of East-West relations, he may risk stealing from his Republican candidates what has been a crucial element in their party’s approach to foreign policy and national security matters: the theme that Democrats fought the defense build-up of the 1980s--which actually was born during the final year of Democrat Jimmy Carter’s presidency--and refused to stand up to Moscow.

“The threat abroad will be so diminished that the rap on Democrats will no longer carry much weight,” Larry Sabato, a University of Virginia political scientist, predicted.

That view is shared by Richard Moe, former chief of staff to Vice President Walter F. Mondale and a senior adviser to Rep. Richard A. Gephardt when the Missouri Democrat ran for his party’s 1988 presidential nomination.

“The more convinced that American voters become that the Cold War is over, the more they’re going to focus on domestic concerns, and that is an opportunity that the Democrats have,” he said. “If the debate shifts to domestic issues, then we have a chance to redefine ourselves and go on the offensive.”

But for the moment, the summit session offers Bush a degree of political insurance against whatever firestorms--in El Salvador, the Philippines or Nicaragua, for example--that strike on the international scene. And the public efforts in coming weeks to maintain the afterglow of the meeting can help pave the way for Senate consideration of a U.S.-Soviet treaty to cut the superpowers’ arsenals of long-range nuclear weapons, which Bush and Gorbachev hope to sign by the end of June.

To accomplish such a result, Bush’s speeches need do little more than present “a general feel-good” approach to “maintain and add to some of the initial impact” of the summit meeting, said Thomas C. Griscom, who served as President Ronald Reagan’s director of communications in the wake of the Iran-Contra scandal.

Bush flew here after his Denver appearance Friday to boost the Senate campaign of Rep. Tom Tauke (R-Iowa).

In the Houston Astrodome, where on Thursday evening 4,100 Republican Party loyalists contributed $2.4 million to Sen. Phil Gramm’s reelection campaign, the entertainment was country singer Lee Greenwood and the message was of plain old good times to come.

“With the support of the American people, and with the solidarity of the (North Atlantic) Alliance, the promise of a new world of freedom is within our reach,” Bush said.

And, for those who remain skeptical about the future of East-West relations, the White House is offering Vice President Dan Quayle.

In referring to remarks by Quayle in several interviews this week in which he urged a cautious approach, one senior White House aide suggested that the differing perspectives presented by the President and vice president were touching all bases--even as they left an impression of an Administration pulled in different directions.