Bush Now Seen as Just One of the Crowd : Image: President fails to take the lead at Munich summit. Perceptions of weakness on the world stage could damage him politically at home.

At a time when he should be basking in the glow of a weeklong tour on the world stage, George Bush is instead being dogged by the feeling among Western allies that the President of the United States is now just one of the guys.

For Bush, who gladly plays such an “aw, shucks” role when it suits him back home, little could be more damaging as he returns to his bruising reelection campaign at the end of the week.

Facing a tough race and struggling to build an effective campaign staff, Bush can ill afford perceptions of weakness, particularly on foreign policy, where he depends on being seen as a whiz.

“The American President is no longer the one at the front; now he’s just one of seven leaders,” said a European source close to the leadership of the seven-nation summit that Bush attended here before flying to Helsinki Wednesday evening.

The reasons for this shift, he said, cannot be placed entirely at Bush’s feet. The Japanese have become more forceful, the Germans have matured with the end of the Cold War and the French continue to row their own course. But, he added, Bush “has terrible problems at home, and he’s got the election.”

“He’s not faded away, but he’s not No. 1,” he added.

Bush will enter a particularly difficult period when he returns to the United States Friday evening after meetings in Helsinki today and Friday morning of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe.

Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton will claim the Democratic presidential nomination next week at his party’s national convention in New York. And Bush is likely to sit largely in the shadows, except perhaps for a visit to the Major League Baseball All-Star game in San Diego on Tuesday and a possible meeting that day with Mexican President Carlos Salinas de Gortari.

For two or three days he will be fishing with Secretary of State James A. Baker III on Baker’s ranch in Wyoming. It will be an occasion for the two old political chums from Texas to delve, undistracted, into what needs to be done to bail Bush out of his political slump.

Even now, only four months from the election, there is still talk that Bush might do some juggling of the lineup of his White House and campaign staffs.

Sources said Bush had approved at least a mini-shakeup, transferring the longtime head of the White House speech writing operation to make room for a Kentucky Fried Chicken executive who is a newcomer to the Republican team.

The sources said Bush would name 32-year-old Steve Provost, now the head of public affairs for the fast-food company, as assistant to the President for communications. Provost will replace David F. Demarest Jr., who has come under criticism for failing to instill in Bush’s speeches the necessary energy and eloquence for an election year.

Regarding this week’s European trip, a senior White House official conceded that critics will say “it reinforces the idea that he cares more about foreign policy than domestic policy”--a difficult perception to overcome for a President who has made three foreign trips in the first seven months of the election year.

Bush, who sought to portray the Munich summit as a potential boost for the ailing American economy, was forced by Wednesday’s schedule to make his points to a news conference that occurred at noon in Munich but 3 a.m. in California.

“The connection between the economy over there and unemployment here is a very difficult connection to make in a political context,” said one Bush political adviser in Washington.

Making it all the harder, he said, is the fact that the summit drew little attention in the United States.

But the trip has not been without its political pluses.

Even if the summit meeting was “a yawn,” said a senior White House official in Washington, the impact of foreign policy on domestic jobs was brought home when Gov. Carroll A. Campbell Jr. of South Carolina, Bush’s southern regional campaign chief, announced here that BMW would build a plant in his state, creating some 2,000 jobs.

Similarly, a Bush campaign aide said: “If you get down to the bits and pieces, there were photos that left a very good impression--George Bush in Munich with the leaders of the industrial nations, and Bill Clinton on the golf course. Which left a better image?”

Times staff writer Tyler Marshall contributed to this story.