Bush, Raising Campaign Volume, Schedules a Rare Press Conference : Presidency: He’ll seek to push balanced-budget amendment. Aides say his message isn’t being heard because of Perot.

Emerging from the primary season both triumphant and beleaguered, President Bush moved Wednesday to turn his campaign up a notch by scheduling a rare prime-time news conference tonight and moving more aggressively to take advantage of the public appeal of a balanced-budget amendment.

Although these steps and others are not as drastic as some Republicans think are necessary--such as a shake-up of the entire campaign staff--they reflect the conclusion that much more must be done to combat Ross Perot.

“The frustration here is that the President’s message isn’t being carried,” said Bush campaign manager Frederic V. Malek. “It’s being drowned out” by Perot.

White House and Bush campaign officials now fully acknowledge that the Perot threat is here to stay. A very serious, three-way race is unavoidable, they say, with at least one senior official calling the Perot campaign nothing short of “phenomenal.”

And, most important, they allow that each of the three principle candidates--Bush, Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton, the presumptive Democratic nominee, and Perot--has a reasonable chance of winning.

Despite the sense that bold moves will be required, the two new efforts announced Wednesday already have met with mixed results.

The effort to take his message directly to the nation through blanket coverage by the three major broadcast companies and Cable News Network backfired when ABC, CBS and NBC said they would not carry the news conference live.

“Mr. Bush is involved in a very close race for the presidency. The White House has not demonstrated that the news value of his press conference outweighs its possible political content,” said NBC News president Michael Gartner.

And while Bush’s decision to promote his support for the balanced-budget amendment reflected an attempt to capture the momentum on an issue that is helping Perot’s fight-the-system bid, the move was not without risks. Politicizing the issue further could derail a bipartisan effort and drive away Democrats who now support it.

As if to underscore the point, Budget Director Richard G. Darman and House Speaker Thomas S. Foley (D-Wash.) expressed wildly divergent viewpoints on the subject Wednesday.

In a special briefing, Darman called efforts to pass the amendment “a major confrontation worthy of the stakes,” and he used it to portray Bush as taking the side of the American people against old-line members of Congress.

“It’s a good political issue for us,” a senior White House official said.

Foley grew vehement in his opposition to the proposal, calling it “very pernicious and ill-advised.”

At the heart of the President’s approach, White House and campaign officials said Wednesday, is the hope that Perot’s attraction will wear off--or that voters will grow wary, rather than infatuated, with the unknown that he represents.

Thus, even at a time when incumbency itself appears to be a liability for all office seekers, the President’s campaign, with little choice, is embracing it.

His selection of the White House East Room for the news conference puts him in the most public presidential setting he can command. He then embarks on a series of international meetings, in Rio de Janeiro next week, with Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin in Washington one week later, and then, during the week before the Democratic National Convention, in Warsaw, Munich and Helsinki.

Already having decided to portray himself as “presidential,” rather than “political,” he has said he will not directly respond to campaign attacks or comment on his opponents at this stage. But he has repeatedly signaled the tack he will take in coming weeks.

“As November approaches, I believe there will be two questions foremost in the minds of American voters,” Bush said in a statement issued Tuesday after the last primaries were completed. “Who has the best ideas for America? Who do you trust to lead this country?”

Meanwhile, at the White House, there was a degree of disappointment in the announcement in Dallas that Edward J. Rollins had decided to join with Hamilton Jordan, President Jimmy Carter’s White House chief of staff, as co-chairman of the Perot campaign.

Shortly before Rollins’ new job was announced, his wife, Sherrie, resigned as assistant to the President for intergovernmental affairs, a senior staff position.

Times staff writers William J. Eaton and Thomas B. Rosenstiel contributed to this story.