NEWS ANALYSIS : President’s Insider Image May Be Costly to Republican Candidates : Politics: White House aides are predicting a Truman-style homestretch effort. But Bush is seen as more likely to give ‘em heck, sort of.

With his popularity in national polls dropping below 50% for the first time and a major election only a week away, this is the dilemma President Bush faces: 1990 is shaping up as the year of the outsider and he is the ultimate insider.

In recent days, Bush has tried to grab for an outsider’s image. On Friday, for example, he endorsed measures to limit the terms of legislators and claimed that the budget deal painstakingly negotiated by his aides made him “gag.”

And aides say that in the week remaining before congressional and state elections, Bush, who was to campaign in San Francisco and Oklahoma City today, will redouble his efforts to win the affections of disaffected voters.

Political analysts from both parties are skeptical, however. Unlike Ronald Reagan, who through eight years in the White House always seemed able to position himself as a nonpolitician unconnected to the Washington Establishment, Bush has spent his career emphasizing his Establishment credentials.

Even Bush’s speech emphasizes his insider status: he delights in littering his sentences with acronyms, from CSCE to SPR, and seldom seems to worry that his listeners may be baffled by obscure references to arcane matters such as the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe or the Strategic Petroleum Reserve.

Now, with the economy weakening and the political Establishment floundering, voters have turned deeply pessimistic and skeptical, numerous polls show, and “insider” has become an epithet from which candidates flee.

In another time, Bush, who does not have to face the voters himself until 1992, would be able to shrug off his image problem as a temporary phenomenon. Just as his real support was never as high as the stratospheric ratings of this summer’s polls seemed to show, the voters probably are not truly as angry at him now as the latest polls indicate.

Unfortunately for Bush, next Tuesday’s elections are contests in which his fellow Republicans have put great stock. Republicans had hoped to pick up several Senate seats, to put them within striking distance of taking a Senate majority in 1992. And they had hoped to win enough governorships and state legislative seats around the country to substantially improve their leverage in next year’s battle over redrawing legislative district lines to reflect the 1990 census.

As recently as six weeks ago, Bush’s aides had predicted confidently that the President would be able to use his then-tremendous popularity to cow congressional Democrats and win large numbers of voters over to his side. In those not-so-long-ago days, the worst the White House worried about was whether Bush might come on too strong.

Now those hopes are faded memories.

A Gallup poll conducted for Newsweek over the last several days, for example, found just 48% of Americans approving of Bush’s handling of the presidency, down from 57% a month ago. Similarly, a poll conducted last week for The Times in Orange County found that while Bush’s personal popularity remained high, his handling of the economy got a “fair” or “poor” rating from more than 60% of those surveyed in one of the most secure Republican strongholds in the nation.

GOP strategists increasingly voice fear that many demoralized Republicans will not show up at the polls while the Democrats, energized by populist campaign talk of economic fairness and taxing the rich, will see their voter turnout rise.

The White House strategy Bush will try to put into effect this week is to counteract that trend by turning voter anger against Congress and its Democratic majority. His aides speak hopefully of a “Harry Truman-style” attack, evoking the campaign of 1948 as an example of how a President can turn around a seemingly hopeless situation.

But in trying to turn voter anger to his advantage, Bush faces two major hurdles.

The first is his concentration on foreign policy at the expense of the domestic policy questions that seem to be motivating voters.

Bush made that clear at a press conference here Saturday, when he remarked that he wished he could have negotiated a budget agreement “without this inside-the-Beltway furor” because the budget debate had “diverted me from major objectives.”

Bush’s preference for the “major objectives” of foreign policy, where he has pushed bipartisanship, coupled with his lack of any specific domestic-policy message, make it difficult for him to attack the opposition with anything near Truman’s single-mindedness. In addition, he has relied on Democratic votes for every major initiative that his Administration has passed this year, from the budget to the new Clean Air Act to child care tax credits.

In speeches over the last weekend of campaigning, Bush bashed the Democrats in one breath, then in the next breath praised their support of his Persian Gulf policy.

And while Bush demonstrated during his own campaign in 1988 that he is perfectly willing to conduct a nasty campaign, he has never shown great relish for political unpleasantness. While Truman’s slogan was “give ‘em hell!” Bush’s approach has been to give ‘em heck, sort of.

The second problem, political analyst William Schneider said, is the voters’ essential perception of Bush as “an elite preppie,” a man they were willing to like when times were good but one whose handling of the economy they increasingly are coming to doubt now that “people feel threatened.”

Bush, Schneider noted, is “the first candidate born to wealth and privilege the Republicans dared to nominate since William Howard Taft in 1908.”

The current feeling among many voters is that Bush and the Republicans essentially have at heart the interests of the wealthy came as a shock to some in the White House, but, said Schneider, Bush “has been asking for it ever since he was nominated.”