Debate Challenge Cheers Up Bush Troops : Politics: The President’s proposal appears to have sent a surge of optimism through the top ranks of his campaign.

Never mind the lagging polls. Forget about the calendar closing in.

With one sentence beginning “I hereby challenge my opponent,” the mood within the Bush campaign--and, more important, the mood of President Bush himself--has undergone a sudden swing to the sunny side.

This new feeling, sparked by Bush’s call for four consecutive Sunday night debates leading up to the election, may just be surface deep. It may not penetrate the depths where the President and his aides must confront the fact that no candidate in 56 years of polling has been this far behind and come back to win the presidency.

Still, it is showing up throughout the upper levels of Bush’s team:

* To the upbeat tones of country music’s Oak Ridge Boys throbbing through the Acuff Theatre at Nashville’s Opryland U.S.A., Mary Matalin, the campaign’s political director, danced in the aisle as Bush completed a daylong tour of Tennessee on Tuesday.

* Press Secretary Marlin Fitzwater, questioned why Bush’s opponent, Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton, seems unwilling to debate. After weeks of defending his boss’s apparent reluctance to square off, Fitzwater seemed to relish the role reversal.

* And the President seemed to draw renewed energy from his challenge and the Clinton camp’s initial fumbling response. He took on the new political medium of talk-show television, presenting the audience of a Nashville Network cable TV program with his credible imitation of entertainer/businessman Jimmy Dean, who was seated at his side, doing a television advertisement for, yes, Jimmy Dean sausage.

But after months of backbiting over responsibility for the President’s inability to overcome his troubled poll standings, there is no way to tell if the sunnier mood is more than temporary.

For the moment, Bush campaign aides and other advisers are enjoying the fact that the political landscape appears to have undergone a transformation, not only as a result of the debate proposal but also as a result of Ross Perot’s decision to plunge into the race.

A longtime Bush adviser said that even though Bush was “working like hell campaigning, we were on a treadmill.”

The challenge the President issued in Clarksville, Tenn., has presented “a focus to the campaign that wasn’t there, and if you’re running behind in the polls, it’s all you could ask for,” he said.

If nothing else, pictures of an upbeat President can prove irresistible to television producers, making their way into evening news reports and presenting an image of optimism that can counter reports that might otherwise focus on Bush’s political problems.

Bush could not have appeared more upbeat on Tuesday night as he completed his day at Opryland, looking more like a winning quarterback in a locker room.

He waved to the audience, trotted back and forth across the stage to acknowledge every musician, all the while chatting incessantly, unheard beyond those right next to him as the band kept up its riffs.

None of this is to say that the President was in a sour mood before he delivered the debate challenge. Bush has not been one to mope as he goes through the paces of the campaign trail.

Complaining, perhaps, when he feels he is being treated unfairly, either by his opponent or by reporters. But moping? No.

As he has gotten deeper and deeper into the campaign in recent weeks, his language grew more loose, and aides said he was pumped up by the crowds.

Eight years ago, when he was running for reelection as vice president, Bush had this thing about ducks. If someone walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, he’s a duck, Bush would say over and over. Never mind that he was talking about communism in Nicaragua--he managed to make the connection.

The years since have widened his experience. By this week, Bush’s Politically Useful Zoological Lexicon also included fish, chickens, the bald eagle and a chameleon.

Taking cuts at Clinton for not stemming pollution of his state’s waterways by runoff from chicken droppings--the poultry industry is a major force in Arkansas--Bush said: “I love fishing. I’m a bass fisherman. The fish in Arkansas light up at night because of what the chickens are doing to the river.”

And, he said, Clinton’s yes-no support for the Persian Gulf War would mean that “if he ever became President of the United States--and he won’t--we’d have to replace the American eagle with a chameleon.”