Bush Is Seen as Reaping Few Gains From His Veto Victory in Senate : Congress: A defeat so early in the legislative session would have shaken the Administration’s confidence.

“It was a great victory,” a senior White House aide remarked Friday, but his words were betrayed by the sarcasm in his voice as he reviewed the suspenseful Senate vote that upheld President Bush’s veto of the Chinese students bill.

For all the tough clinch-fighting the White House waged to win 37 Senate votes--three more than the President needed to prevent an override of the veto--Bush did not achieve major gains. He simply staved off an embarrassing defeat.

To be sure, he can continue to pursue a foreign policy course with China that means much to him personally. But his victory is not considered stunning for a second-year President soaring high in public opinion polls, with approval ratings around 80%.

The vote was important, officials acknowledged, primarily because it was not the debacle it might have been. Losing the showdown would have squandered substantial presidential political capital and, with a new congressional session just opening, shaken confidence in the Administration’s ability to hold its own against the Democratic majorities on Capitol Hill.

At issue was whether Congress would override Bush’s veto of legislation that would have lifted a provision of a current law that requires Chinese students to return home for two years after completing their studies in this country.

Students Fearful

The measure that would have repealed the provision was intended to protect students fearing retaliation for supporting last spring’s pro-democracy demonstrations in China.

Bush, who believed that the passage of the bill would further antagonize China’s leaders, argued that an executive order he had issued would accomplish the same thing. He gave written assurances to several wavering senators that he would guarantee such protection “as long as I am President.”

Of 535 members of the House and Senate, Bush won the votes of only 62--all Republicans. Given those numbers, said Steven L. Engelberg, a campaign adviser to a number of Democratic presidential candidates, “it doesn’t say a great deal about his ability to deal with the Congress.”

In the House, in particular, he said: “The Democrats aren’t particularly intimidated by him.”

House Speaker Thomas S. Foley (D-Wash.) said that the 25 Republican votes in the House to sustain the veto presented Bush with the second-worst showing in the Speaker’s memory of presidential veto confrontations with Congress.

“It’s hardly a ringing endorsement of his popularity,” Foley said at a breakfast with reporters on Friday.

For Bush, however, the timing of the vote to sustain his veto could not have been better. By all accounts, he faces a more difficult year in his dealings with Congress than he experienced in 1989.

The Capitol is abuzz with an agenda that includes such potentially contentious issues as a national child care program, renewal of the Clean Air Act and a politically sensitive proposal by Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-N.Y.) to reduce the taxes that fill the Social Security trust fund.

In effect, a Bush defeat in the Senate would have made it easier for Republicans to vote against him on other issues.

A loss in Thursday’s vote “wouldn’t have been the end of the world, but it would have been a bad sign for the year,” said one senior White House official, speaking on condition of anonymity.

“Starting off on something like this was a choice of the Democratic leaders in Congress,” said Frederick D. McClure, Bush’s assistant for congressional liaison.

“This indicates his willingness to use the veto . . . . This indicates he has the ability to put together a blocking coalition when necessary,” the presidential aide said.

And, should Bush decide to maintain his past veto pace this year--he vetoed 11 measures last year and was never overridden--White House officials feel that the President also will be able to preserve his record of veto victories.

“Some people think we’ll never get a veto that will be harder to sustain than this one, and, therefore, we have shown that we can do it,” another senior White House official said. Bush has been stressing bipartisanship in foreign policy and, to a lesser extent, in domestic affairs, a theme on which he will dwell in his State of the Union message Wednesday evening.

Even so, his supporters have not shied away from characterizing Thursday’s vote as a partisan matter in which it was crucial for Republicans to line up behind the President, regardless of their thoughts on protecting the Chinese students.

“The Democrats wanted to use this issue to bash Bush out of the box and to show him who was boss, and that’s what has made their defeat so crushing,” an aide to Senate Minority Leader Bob Dole (R-Kan.) said. “So in that sense the President’s victory does set the tone for his relations with Congress this year.”

Larry Sabato, a professor of government at the University of Virginia, agreed that the Democrats got “thrown by the horse they were trying to break.” But he said that the political impact was likely to be minimal because the issue on which Bush staked his prestige “is just not a very memorable one for most people.”

Constituency Small

Outside of states such as California, with its large numbers of voters of Asian origin, the Chinese students do not have much of a constituency in the United States. And most people were “confused by an issue in which both sides claimed to be doing the same thing, namely protecting the Chinese students,” Sabato said.

Political analysts agreed that while a defeat for the President would have had a significant political impact, the impact of a victory in this case was limited by both the narrowness of the issue and the partisan overtones it took.

“If the President had lost, there would have been important consequences. If the Democrats had supported the President, there would have been important consequences,” said Stephan Hess, a political analyst and senior fellow with the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank.

“But the fact that the President gets 37 out of 45 Republican senators makes me wonder: What’s new?”

Staff writer William J. Eaton contributed to this story.