PERSPECTIVE ON THE GOP CONVENTION : Mrs. Bush Stands Tall in the Hogwash : She’s widely admired for her personal and political demeanor, yet she’s saddled with a party on the low road.

George Bush has sustained the longest decline in presidential popularity ever recorded--57 percentage points. Compared to that, the continued high popularity of Barbara Bush stands out as an anomaly worthy of explanation. She is not glamorous like Jackie Kennedy. She does not exert control over the White House, especially in comparison to her two immediate predecessors, Nancy Reagan and Roslyn Carter. She is not a politician or a career woman. The secret to Barbara Bush is that she is the most powerful average American in the country.

Like the blunt-talking Ross Perot who captured the hearts of an America fed up with politics as usual, Barbara Bush comes off as a beacon of good, solid common sense in a political world that most Americans find distasteful.

Take the question of family values. The Republicans have chosen it as one of the cornerstones of the Bush reelection movement. You can’t turn around at this convention without hearing someone extol the virtues of the Republican Party as the true repository of family values.

Upon his arrival in Houston Monday, the vice president went immediately to a God and Country rally sponsored by the Christian Coalition. In case anyone missed the point about family, the room was packed with children and babies who sometimes squalled in distress as their parents bellowed out their approval of Dan Quayle’s rhetoric. “It is irresponsible,” he roared, in a reference to his famous attack on the TV character Murphy Brown, “to portray unwed motherhood as preferable. . . . I don’t care what the media say, I don’t care what the critics say, I will never back down.”

The first 36 pages of the Republican platform are devoted to families and family values; an entire evening of the convention will be given over to family values. The heroine of this effort will be Barbara Bush, who has become for this crowd the embodiment of the issue they are trying to ride to hold onto the White House. She is slated to speak in prime time Wednesday night in an effort to get some of her own popularity to rub off on her husband.

And yet Mrs. Bush seems a somewhat reluctant heroine--perhaps because the drama in which she is asked to take part has such a seedy and unpleasant side. The Republicans have mounted a three-pronged attack--on abortion, homosexuality and Hillary Clinton--attempting to paint all three as serious threats to traditional family values. They are working especially hard to make this race into one between the popular, traditional Barbara Bush and the baby-boomer career woman, Hillary Clinton. But in an interview late last week, Mrs. Bush said that abortion and homosexuality were deeply personal issues that did not belong in the platform and, perhaps more significant, she rebuked party chairman Rich Bond for his attacks on Hillary Clinton.

This shows why Barbara Bush is so popular. The average American is, we know, uncomfortable with abortion, and yet, with the exception of the extremists gathered here in Houston, very few Americans would require the victim of a rape or incest to carry the child to term. The average American is not a homosexual, but, with the exception of the homophobes gathered here in Houston, most Americans are tolerant and they do not place homosexuals at the top of their list of personal concerns.

Most American women of Barbara Bush’s generation had no real option but to be the best wife and mother that they could be. But their daughters have options; their daughters are, like Hillary Clinton, pioneers, whether they are lawyers, Navy pilots or telephone repair women. Their mothers probably alternate between envy and sympathy for them--but by and large their mothers support them.

The Republican extremists are trying to use Barbara Bush in an cynical political ploy in an obsolete political debate. But Barbara Bush, like the average Americans who feel compassion for people whose lives they wouldn’t want to live, and who work and mother at the same time, has said, for the time being at least, no.