COLUMN ONE : Quick, Sign Some Big Checks : In a flurry of activity, the President turns to the time-honored practice of doling out money to satisfy key voters. One problem--the tactic hasn’t always worked.

In announcing on Wednesday a massive increase in government aid for wheat farmers that will help politically vital Midwestern states and a jet fighter sale that will save the jobs of Texas aerospace workers, President Bush clearly illuminated a key part of his plan for winning back disaffected voters.

Bush’s strategy is simple--hand out federal aid and make policy decisions that benefit important voting groups, even though it sometimes means diverging from his long-held policies.

Beginning with a $2-billion job retraining program announced last week, Bush’s campaign has been dominated by announcements of presidential largess, from hurricane-ravaged Florida to the rippling grainlands of South Dakota.

And there may be more of the same to come. “We’re looking for actions the President can take on his own over the next two months,” a White House official said.

Next in line, according to several aides: Easing environmental restrictions on the production of ethanol, the fuel made from corn--a decision likely to be announced soon in the corn-growing state of Illinois.

Using the powers of the White House to impress the voters is a time-honored tactic for presidents caught in tough reelection races, at least in the 20th Century. Franklin D. Roosevelt did it; Lyndon B. Johnson did it. Richard M. Nixon revived it as the “Rose Garden” strategy. Now George Bush has taken the Rose Garden on the road, complete with checkbook.

“This is a practice as old as the republic,” says scholar Steven Hess of the Brookings Institution. “The only thing that’s changed is the nature of the largess.”

Bush may have taken the tactic to a new level of intensity. “It is a bit unusual to see something as explicit as this,” said George Frederickson, who specializes in the history of the 19th Century at Stanford University.

There is only one problem with the strategy--by itself, it does not necessarily work. This seems to be especially true if the nature of a President’s actions does not seem to flow naturally and logically from his basic policies and beliefs.

“Largess is generally of very little help,” says Stuart E. Eizenstat, then-President Jimmy Carter’s domestic policy adviser during the 1980 campaign that ended with Ronald Reagan winning the White House.

“We did it repeatedly. We tried everything we could think of. When you’re in the last few months of a presidential campaign, you have very little control over big factors like the economy, so you try to work with little things. But the American people vote for a President on big issues--the economy, national security, leadership and vision--not on who brings home the bacon.”

In Bush’s case, the flurry of activity has yet to yield any clear improvement in most polls. And even some White House aides worry that the President’s sudden enthusiasm for federal activism may clash with their campaign’s more fundamental message that Bush wants to shrink Washington’s role in American life.

“We’ll argue that these are special circumstances,” said one. “But if it becomes a pattern we’ll get killed.”

Democratic presidents can try to use election-year initiatives to back up their argument that an activist federal government benefits the voters, he noted. “But we’re trying to campaign on a conservative platform of spending restraint,” he said.

To be sure, not all of Bush’s recent initiatives involve spending new federal money; several cost nothing at all. And some, like the decision to provide federal aid to the victims of Hurricane Andrew, might well have been adopted even in a non-election year, as the President’s aides insisted.

But they all cast the President in the role of “dispenser of patronage,” Hess said. “It’s in the tradition of ‘To the victor belongs the spoils,’ ” he said, quoting Sen. William Marcy, a New York boss of the Andrew Jackson era.

In the last week-and-a-half:

* Bush unveiled a $2-billion program to retrain workers who lose their jobs because of freer trade, a type of program he once resisted as expensive and ineffective. He said the new spending would be balanced by cuts in other programs, but refused to say what cuts--if any--he had in mind.

* The President said the federal government would pay the entire cost of rebuilding South Florida’s schools, hospitals, bridges and other public facilities, instead of the usual 75%.

* He also promised to rebuild Homestead Air Force Base, the hurricane-struck area’s largest employer, even though a commission on bases had recommended its closing. Defense Secretary Dick Cheney said helping South Florida’s economy recover was a major reason to revive the base; aides noted that the cost could reach $500 million, and will require a congressional appropriation.

* He announced $775 million in disaster assistance for farmers--and noted pointedly that the recipients will include not only the rice growers of Louisiana and the avocado growers of Florida, whose crops were destroyed by Andrew, but also flood-hit cotton growers in East Texas, a state critical to his election hopes.

* He tripled the amount of wheat eligible for export subsidies from 10 million metric tons to 30 million--half of the 1992-93 U.S. crop--thus guaranteeing farmers $1 billion in federal payments, according to Agriculture Department estimates. After first announcing the plan in South Dakota on Wednesday, he later told cheering farmers in Shallowater, Tex., that it represented “the largest (export subsidy) initiative in history.”

Bush has been pressing U.S. trading partners in Europe to reduce their agricultural subsidies, and the increase was certain to draw gibes from Paris and Bonn--but it played well in Shallowater. Aides explained that Bush still wanted global subsidy reductions, but until he gets them he intends “to ensure that U.S. producers are able to compete.”

* Also Wednesday, in a significant foreign policy reversal, he announced that the United States will allow General Dynamics Corp. to sell 150 F-16 fighter jets to Taiwan--saving at least 5,800 Texas jobs. Previously, the Administration insisted that under a 1982 agreement, no new jets could be sold; but officials decided to argue that the new planes are really just “spare parts,” whose sale the pact allows.

Workers at the aircraft maker’s plant in Ft. Worth had no objections to the foreign policy switch when Bush announced his action there on Wednesday. “Allll right,” they cheered, holding up signs that read: “F-16 jobs for Texas.”

Two more similar decisions are in view, Administration officials said:

On a visit to Illinois next week, Bush is expected to waive restrictions on the production of ethanol, bringing a potential windfall to corn farmers. Ethanol burns far cleaner than gasoline, but can be produced from corn only through a process that entails serious air pollution. For that reason, Clean Air Act restrictions effectively limit the amount of ethanol manufacturers can produce without paying substantial penalties.

The Administration is expected to waive the restrictions, arguing that the clean air benefits of the fuel outweigh the costs of its production.

The President is also moving toward a decision to approve the sale of 72 F-15 fighter jets to Saudi Arabia, a move that would save defense jobs in California and Missouri, where manufacturer McDonnell Douglas Corp. is based. Only a month ago, State Department officials said the sale was unlikely, because it would provoke major opposition from Congress and from pro-Israel voters. Indeed, the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations denounced the sale on Wednesday.

But Cheney hinted that a positive decision was near, telling an interviewer that Saudi Arabia has “legitimate security needs and we have an interest to helping them satisfy those needs.”

Campaigning for reelection to the White House didn’t always rely on using the federal government’s power to local economic advantage. Up until Roosevelt’s New Deal, the federal government wasn’t big enough to provide much largess--except in the sense of the patronage appointments that followed every election, rewarding the party faithful.

Bitter political battles were fought in the 19th Century over such issues as “internal improvements,” that is, whether government should spend money on roads and canals and other projects that today would be considered investments in “infrastructure.” But presidents back then did not wage the active personal campaigns they do now, and they could not take the kinds of actions Bush and his modern counterparts routinely take to sweeten the pot for voters.

But Franklin Roosevelt used the office as never before, launching such programs as Social Security and massive rural electrification projects that created a generation of loyal Democrats.

So powerful was the impact of rural electrification in South Dakota, for instance, that decades later politicians still referred to Democratic voters in one section of the state as “Jim River Democrats” because farmers living along the James River--Republicans almost to the man--converted to F.D.R.’s party after he brought them electricity and continued to vote Democratic for decades thereafter.

Harry S. Truman, his successor, proposed a raft of social welfare programs in the election year of 1948, and when Republicans blocked them, campaigned gleefully against the “Do-Nothing Congress.”

More recent presidents, beginning with Johnson and Nixon, honed the technique by announcing local economic development programs in key states. President Gerald R. Ford, a Republican, set a record in 1976 when he announced several spending programs on a trip to Florida, including a $33-million missile purchase and an $18-million mass transit project.

Four years later, his Democratic successor, Jimmy Carter, pledged massive federal aid to the victims of 1980’s great natural disaster, the eruption of Mt. St. Helens in Washington.

Both Ford and Carter lost.

“You get very little benefit from this stuff, except among those immediately affected,” former Carter aide Eizenstat said. “And even they often pocket the help and figure it was coming to them.”

“Just as often, you end up creating a negative impression,” he warned. “If the technique is carried too far, all you get is voter cynicism.”

Times staff writers Douglas Jehl, David G. Savage and Robert Shogan contributed to this story.