Bush Holds Satellite Rallies to Dish Up Campaign Spirit : Politics: President asks party faithful at 34 sites to focus on Election Day rather than on worrisome polls.

President Bush reached out by satellite Monday night in an attempt to boost the sagging morale of supporters around the country as even he acknowledged that the principal themes of his reelection campaign are “not resonating” among voters.

Trailing Democratic rival Bill Clinton by nearly 30 points in some new polls, Bush urged invited audiences at 34 locations around the country not to give up hope for a Republican victory.

“It isn’t the week’s polls that count,” the President proclaimed. “It’s what happens in that election booth Nov. 3.”

And Bush campaign general chairman Robert M. Teeter warned darkly that “the stakes have never been higher” than in the current presidential race. “It’s been a tough one, and it’s going to be tougher before it’s over.”

But the GOP pep rallies were in sharp contrast to the grim private mood of White House advisers engaged in a fierce debate over whether Bush should provoke a new confrontation with Congress to re-energize his reelection campaign.

Some White House officials want Bush to adopt a high profile in calling anew for Congress to approve the economic growth proposals he first put forward in January. But others, including Teeter, are said to be fearful that such an effort might only reinforce public disfavor with squabbles between the White House and Capitol Hill.

“If you bash Congress again, you run the risk of voters saying: ‘Is anything ever going to be different?’ ” a White House official said.

The internal dispute leaves unresolved a basic disagreement over how best Bush can begin to regain the allegiance of American voters. In private conversations, White House officials make little pretense that the Bush-backed package of capital-gains tax cuts and other measures might have much effect before the November election.

But with Bush’s disapproval rating at an all-time high, advocates of the confrontational approach argue that Bush must do more to ensure that Congress shares the blame for the lackluster state of the economy.

“If the Democrats won’t pass it, then the President’s got an issue,” Senate Minority Leader Bob Dole (R-Kan.) said over the weekend. “If we can pass it, we may have a little breakthrough. But it’s not going to turn the economy around.”

A White House aide put it more bluntly. “Voters don’t like the way the country is headed, and that leaves us with two choices: Either we blame Congress, or they blame Bush.”

The decision will be central to the strategy the White House adopts as it mounts an uphill battle against Clinton. But such is the uncertainty within the Bush campaign that aides predicted the issue would not be resolved until Secretary of State James A. Baker III--the President’s closest political adviser and the man increasingly expected to take charge of the reelection effort--returns from his current trip to the Middle East.

Just how far uphill Bush has to go was documented in two new polls Monday. One, by USA Today, Cable News Network and Gallup, showed Clinton leading Bush 56% to 28%, with a margin of error of plus or minus three percentage points. A new ABC-Washington Post poll conducted Friday through Sunday gave Clinton a similar margin--58% to 29%, with an error margin of plus or minus four points. Post-convention poll margins typically do not hold up through the election, however.

Already Monday, there were signs that the Bush camp was stepping up its efforts to regain lost political momentum. The Bush campaign dispatched no fewer than 10 Cabinet secretaries to deliver rousing speeches to some of the Monday night rallies.

And even before Bush traveled to a specially equipped Washington television studio to speak by satellite to the party faithful, he spent two hours taping new advertisements that his campaign--flush with a $7-million bankroll--plans to broadcast in the next three weeks.

At the same time, the White House announced that Bush would make campaign trips next month even during a week that had previously been set aside for a presidential vacation at his home in Kennebunkport, Me.

As Bush launched Monday morning into a new defense of his domestic record, however, his campaign-style remarks to an audience in the White House Rose Garden were tinged with a glum realism. “We’ve got the programs,” he proclaimed of his Administration’s achievements on crime, education and health care.

But he spoke with unusual candor in acknowledging: “That’s not resonating. . . . The facts are: The programs are sound. I hope that I will pass the test of commitment to the country.”

The early efforts by Bush and his lieutenants to winnow the Democratic lead have so far relied on a low-risk strategy designed to raise questions about Clinton’s intentions while reminding voters of the President’s foreign policy record.

At the same time, aides like Teeter and GOP National Committee Chairman Richard N. Bond have been assigned the role of delivering blunter attacks--a job they performed in introducing Bush in his Monday night appearance.

Teeter said the departure of Ross Perot had transformed the race between Bush and Clinton into “a choice between two starkly different philosophies” and asked of voters: “Do they want (New York Gov.) Mario Cuomo as the next justice on the Supreme Court?”

Bush used the satellite appearance primarily to outline a three-part reelection agenda based on economic growth, family values and law and order. He said Republicans should “all take great pride that the ideas we’ve been espousing for generations are now being paid lip service by the other party.”

The satellite hookup allowed Republicans at some of the 34 remote sites to pose questions to Bush. But in the highly scripted exchange, only state party chairmen and Republican senators and governors were permitted access to a microphone.

“We’re poised for a spectacular (economic) recovery,” Bush said, responding to comments from California Gov. Pete Wilson. “The economy is growing. Interest rates are down and inflation is down.”

Proposing a “return to the moral principles of this nation,” Bush said an important component of that action would be to offer job incentives for welfare recipients.

“What happens in the White House is not nearly as important as what happens in your house,” he said. “We have to encourage people to work and get off welfare. It’s not a race or a minority problem. We’re talking about an American problem.”

Earlier, in his Rose Garden remarks to teen-agers taking part in the American Legion Boys’ Nation program, Bush characterized Clinton’s economic plan as nothing but “smoke and mirrors.” Dole separately labeled the ticket Clinton shares with Tennessee Sen. Al Gore as “Clinton/More: more taxes, more spending.”

Bush also sought to restore what he described as balance to the portrait painted by the Democrats during their party convention last week. He complained that his rivals had failed to mention his Administration’s accomplishments “in bringing peace to the world and standing up against aggression in the process.”

So far, he conceded, that theme also “has no resonance” with voters. But he quickly added: “I think it will. I think every family in America in their hearts know that we are in a less threatened position.”

The President also gently scolded Clinton for appropriating a longstanding Bush campaign theme--”If we can change the world, we can change America”-- for use in his address Thursday to the Democratic National Convention.

“This is a comment I’ve been saying,” Bush protested. He noted that “another Democrat”--Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware--dropped out of the 1988 presidential race after a campaign speech was revealed as a product of “plagiarism.”