NEWS ANALYSIS : Political Problems Cloud Bush’s Holiday : Campaign: Instead of basking in his triumphs, the President is trying to cope with a drop in the polls. Some aides see a strategy change in the air.

President Bush’s retreat to his well-groomed family compound here this weekend brought with it a timeless sense of order. But it could not shake a mood of White House unease borne by shattered assumptions.

This was to have been the crowning weekend of a spring Bush and his advisers had expected to be a season of recovery. Republican challenger Patrick J. Buchanan had been beaten back, Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton would be floundering, and with the economy on the rebound, Bush’s fortunes would at last improve.

Instead, the President’s popularity continues to decline, and it is untested Ross Perot who has climbed to the top of some presidential preference polls. The old calculations seem to have given way without warning to an inexplicable new math.

Bush has spent the Memorial Day weekend mostly at play, clinging to his golf-and-boating Kennebunkport routine. But the headaches buried in those unfamiliar equations seem to have deprived his holiday of some of its usual vibrancy.

Asked on Sunday morning how he was doing, the usually ebullient vacationer replied with uncommon somberness. “About a seven,” he said, without elaboration.

This is hardly the first time that a presidential holiday here has been overshadowed by the unexpected. When Iraq invaded Kuwait in August, 1990, and again during last summer’s Soviet coup, Bush and his aides grappled--between rounds of golf and boating--with the perilous side of a fast-changing world.

But each of those crises helped add to Bush’s stature. Without apparent qualms, he held forth from jogging trails and putting greens to lay claim to world leadership. His current plight instead has left him diminished, and his plan of action this weekend has been to recede from public sight.

He has ventured from his compound only for golf and church, shunning the power walks and restaurant excursions that could leave him open to questioning. And at the Cape Arundel links where golf has sometimes seemed no more than a backdrop to a running news conference, new rules restrict reporters to the clubhouse porch.

White House aides insist that the new rules are simply a reaction to reporters whose insistent questioning took a toll on Bush’s game. But other advisers call the strategy a variation on the maxim that advises saying nothing unless you have something nice to say.

“When things are going right, you win every time you open your mouth,” one senior campaign official said. “But when things are going wrong, and you’ve got the press against you, it doesn’t matter what the President says. It always comes out looking bad.”

With no sign of an end to Bush’s seven-month public opinion plunge, his advisers were particularly discomfited by a scene last weekend at graduation ceremonies at the University of Notre Dame, where his speech was upstaged by remarks delivered by the 21-year-old class valedictorian.

As Bush listened uncomfortably from the stage, the young woman won applause with a condemnation that scolded as “self-congratulatory” his claim to be the world’s undisputed leader. “There was nothing he could do,” one adviser said later after Bush chose not to respond to the criticism. “Anything he said would have looked defensive.”

For the record, Bush insists that he remains confident of winning reelection, even in what now shapes up as a three-man race. He has said his optimism is “predicated” on his faith in an improving economy. But his sagging standing suggests that the correlation may not be so neat, and his remarks also betray a note of longing for a simpler equation.

Sounding almost wistful at a fund-raising picnic in Westchester County, N.Y., last week, he seemed to blame his persistent troubles on the unwillingness of Americans to recognize good news.

“Seventy percent of Americans think the economy is getting worse,” he said. “They are wrong. It’s beginning to move.”

Bush’s advisers also insist publicly that it is too early to pay much heed to the signs of political trouble. Even if an untested Texas billionaire is running ahead of the President of the United States, they proclaim, the election is still more than five months away.

But privately they express concern at the plunge in Bush’s ratings that followed the Los Angeles riots and by indications in many polls that the violence added to a widespread sense that the nation is on the wrong track.

Those private tensions have already begun to explode behind closed doors. At a recent senior staff meeting, Robert A. Mosbacher, the Bush campaign’s 1992 general chairman, was said to have delivered a stunning tirade of criticism about a campaign he said had too often failed in both planning and execution.

The speech was exceptional in large part because Mosbacher, the former commerce secretary, has until now deferred to campaign Chairman Robert M. Teeter. Two high-ranking sources said that Mosbacher had been asked to speak out by Secretary of State James A. Baker III, who has for years been Bush’s most trusted political adviser.

Some campaign officials said the criticism had added to an unsettling recognition that this election may be played by different rules. A senior aide said last week that the parallel surprises of Perot’s strength and Bush’s enduring weakness had caused the campaign to “tear the war plan up and start all over again.”

The President himself left those political advisers behind as he retreated to Kennebunkport for the holiday, and he was clearly in no mood to share his thoughts. But the bad tidings they have carried to him in recent weeks could not have been far from his mind.

As Bush returned to the golf course clubhouse the other day after a deliberate 18-hole round, he caught sight of reporters and camera crews poised in a parking lot to step forward with what he clearly regarded as unwelcome questions.

He raised a hand in preemptive protest and kept his pedal-foot firmly to the floor of the golf cart. “Don’t ask,” he said. “Don’t ask.”