Bush Victory Shallow in Battle for TV Coverage : Campaign: Despite controlling network news of late, the President has been unable to close gap with Clinton.

If technique mattered for everything, the Republicans would be rejoicing.

In the last seven weeks, the race for President usually becomes a competition to control the network news, fought in the trenches by staging daily campaign events, anticipating the opposition’s attacks and trying to manage the context of the news and the interpretation reporters give to it.

This week, and in good measure since Labor Day, President Bush has had the better of this game, often masterfully so.

But to their chagrin, Republicans are finding that so far none of it seems to have mattered. Democratic nominee Bill Clinton’s lead, which Bush aides privately concede to be 11 to 12 points, has remained stable.

In 1988, veteran political reporter Jack Germond found that in the critical 35 days after the Republican Convention, Bush completely controlled the network agenda, and it was during that time that he went ahead to stay.

This year, the race is a “classic struggle” over message, Germond said. Clinton wants to talk about the economy, and Bush wants to talk about Clinton’s character. “And a key is what the networks allow to be the driving force.”

But that formula isn’t working yet for Bush. On Monday, for instance, he appealed for votes in Washington state by talking about how the government should not sacrifice the economy to save the environment.

He got that message on all three traditional network news shows.

“It’s time to make people more important than owls,” he was quoted as saying on NBC and CBS Monday night and on all three networks the next morning.

Clinton all but disappeared. On ABC he managed neither a picture nor a sound bite. On NBC and CBS he was only seen responding to the President’s criticism. And NBC’s longer piece by Andrea Mitchell noted that economists considered Clinton’s plan to reduce the deficit no more credible than Bush’s.

On Tuesday, Bush managed a near-total triumph. First, in a game of political chicken, Bush decided to address a convention of the National Guard Assn. in Salt Lake City instead of sending Vice President Dan Quayle. That persuaded Clinton to change his schedule to do the same, anticipating that the President would attack him on his draft record.

“They had to dance on our dance card,” said a high-ranking White House official. “That’s a win.”

The promise of a nasty confrontation between the two contenders over the draft persuaded all four networks to focus stories on the subject of Clinton and the draft.

CNN and ABC’s “Nightline” devoted 30 minutes to the issue that night.

On the nightly news, NBC’s Lisa Myers noted that the President had not actually attacked Clinton on the draft because he was letting his “surrogates” do it for him.

In a bit of irony, Myers had just played the role of that surrogate by doing a piece detailing what she called Clinton’s three major “inconsistencies” on his draft record.

“The issue isn’t whether he dodged the draft,” Myers’ piece began. “The issue is whether he played loose with the truth.”

That is precisely the way Bush aides were trying to broaden and frame the issue in private discussions with reporters, in part because polling numbers revealed that the overwhelming majority of Americans did not care what Clinton’s draft status was 23 years ago.

ABC and CBS similarly focused on the draft speeches.

In the process, what Clinton had intended to be his message of the day was lost. An elaborately staged endorsement by Silicon Valley executives in California was meant to reinforce Clinton’s contention that he would be the stronger President to rebuild the American economy, especially high-growth industries like electronics.

It did not exist on the network news that night. And in the words of one network correspondent: “If it didn’t happen on the news, it didn’t happen.”

Many of the days since Labor Day were not much better for Clinton. Last week he vanished from the nightly news several times, while Bush successfully staged an elaborate economics speech in Detroit that won widespread coverage.

But Republicans privately acknowledged this week that it produced no bounce for the President. “People seemed to wonder why he hadn’t delivered this speech six months earlier,” one Bush aide acknowledged. “It made the speech seem merely political.”

To some political experts, the last two weeks are powerful evidence of something they have been worried about for months: that Bush’s problems are too fundamental for a well-organized campaign to fix.

“I don’t think that Bush can win this now by winning the battle of the network evening news,” said David Gergen, the former Ronald Reagan Administration communications director who is now editor at large of U.S. News & World Report. “It can be helpful on the margins. . . . But he needs something more fundamental to break open that Clinton lead, a debate, a major revelation, a strong presidential action, if he can do it and not have it seen as wholly political. This is very difficult now.”

What this suggests is that if Clinton can begin to put the draft issue behind him, seize control of his own message and perhaps put Bush on the defensive, the race could widen.

And Clinton did fare better later this week. On Wednesday, ABC led with the fact that the first presidential debate had been canceled because Bush was afraid of the format. ABC correspondent Brit Hume said the President was dodging a format that would have made for “a real debate” in favor of “a joint press conference that insulates the candidates from each other, and of concern to the Bush camp, from the kind of spontaneous exchange that might produce a major blunder.”

On Thursday, NBC’s Myers did a piece detailing “questions” about Bush’s role in the Iran-Contra affair, while ABC’s Beth Nissan detailed how experts believe that neither of the candidates’ plans to reduce the deficit is realistic.

POLITICS AND MEDIA: Keeping watch on how the campaign is portrayed.