PERSPECTIVE ON THE SUPREME COURT : Symbolism Writ Large : In nominating Clarence Thomas, Bush is asking black voters what the Democrats have done for them lately.

Nothing of importance that a President does is without some strategic political calculation. Even the most humdrum campaign visit to the district of a freshman House member is laid on with a kind of meticulous sensitivity to terrain and disposition of forces that would have pleased the great Clausewitz. Major cabinet and judicial appointments are even more dazzlingly complex in the political formulas that underlie them, because these nominations are not merely evidence of the policies a President wishes to follow, but of the groups he wishes to reward.

Symbolic payoffs can be as satisfying to a group as appropriations and programs. And in his nomination of Judge Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court, George Bush is playing symbolic politics at the highest strategic level.

The loyalty of black voters to the Democratic Party has always been a source of frustration for Republicans. There have even been some half-hearted efforts by the GOP to convert blacks with the argument that the Democrats take them for granted. That approach has met with little success because black voters had been persuaded to abandon the party of Lincoln and emancipation in the first place by the Democrats’ own virtuoso of symbolic politics, Franklin D. Roosevelt, when he asked in the 1930s what the Republicans had done for them lately.

No program in Roosevelt’s New Deal specifically targeted blacks. But the frequency with which Eleanor Roosevelt made high-profile appearances at events important to blacks left little doubt where the heart of the Administration really lay. So, while F.D.R. failed to get an anti-lynching statute or a fair employment bill through Congress, he could bind black voters to him and his party with the nomination of Col. Benjamin O. Davis to be a brigadier general in the Army.

Harry Truman could not present loyal black Democrats with a civil-rights bill, but he issued an executive order abolishing segregation in the armed forces. And John F. Kennedy’s telephone call to the imprisoned Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on the eve of the 1960 election boosted turnout among black voters who hitherto had seen little to cheer about in the young Massachusetts senator. Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty gave very important tangible benefits to blacks, along with the most important piece of civil-rights legislation ever to become law, so blacks continue to contribute a preponderance of their votes to Democrats.

But without the White House and with no bright prospect of winning it, and shackled by budget constraints, the Democrats haven’t been able to offer black voters much more than hollow gestures, brave rhetoric and vague promises.

By sending Clarence Thomas’ name to the Senate, George Bush is asking black voters what the Democrats have done for them lately, underlining that question with a payoff of the highest symbolic value.

Does Bush really think he can win over black voters to the party of Jesse Helms and J. Strom Thurmond? He might argue that F.D.R. won them over to the party of arch-segregationists John Rankin and Theodore Bilbo, but that is probably not what the President has in mind.

By appointing Thomas to the high court, Bush can neutralize some of the resentment over his veto of a civil-rights bill, his lack of a clear domestic agenda and even his use of Willie Horton in 1988.

It won’t be as impressive as bringing the black vote back into the Republican fold, but he may accomplish a political feat almost as important: undermining blacks’ faith in the Democrats and assuaging their anger at him--not to the degree that they will pull the lever next to his name in November, 1992, but rather that their zeal to defeat him may be damped enough to persuade many of them to stay home on Election Day.