TV Presents Dark Picture for Bush : POLITICS AND MEDIA: Keeping watch on how the campaign is portrayed. : Media: Polls, interviews with allies and his own travel schedule seemed to work against President. Clinton’s team reinforced the negative images.

By rights, this should have been President Bush’s week on television.

On Monday night, he came through with a consensus personal best in the third and final presidential debate, effectively hammering at Democratic foe Bill Clinton for what Bush termed a “pattern of deception.”

He followed that by campaigning with renewed coherence and energy--railing against everything from “nutty” polls to “nutty” journalists to Ross Perot’s “nutty” ideas.

But through the filter of television, the electrocardiogram of modern politics, Bush’s efforts to save his presidency were betrayed by his party, by the polls and by the darker implications of his own travel schedule.

Even before Monday’s debate began, his strategy of attacking Clinton as an untrustworthy and dissembling character was being undermined by members of his own party.

Minnesota Rep. Vin Weber, a co-chairman of Bush’s campaign, went on NBC and CBS to say: “The character issue has been fully discussed. . . . We don’t need to emphasize that any further.”

Former Ronald Reagan Administration official William J. Bennett may not have helped the GOP cause by saying on CBS that Clinton appeared so far ahead in the polls, that “unless he stumbles or falls, he will probably prevail” on Election Day.

After the debate--and the generally good reviews Bush received for his performance, Bush backer and religious broadcaster Pat Robertson went on his cable television show the next day and said the character attacks on Clinton “make Bush look unpresidential.”

Although Bush has been blasting the press for being against him, most of the members of the national media, if left to their own instincts, would have declared him the debate winner.

“The most spirited performance” so far, said ABC’s Brit Hume. “Bush appeared presidential and spirited when he really needed to,” said NBC’s John Dancy.

Bush even got the sound bites he wanted in the news stories on the debates. “You cannot flip-flop on all these issues. You cannot lead by misleading,” Bush was seen saying on NBC and ABC.

But the instant polls conducted by the media suggested that the public was not as impressed by Bush’s performance as the media were: ABC and NBC found most people thought Clinton won the debate, with Bush coming in third. CBS called it a tie between Clinton and Perot, with Bush third. CNN’s poll found Perot the winner and Bush third.

The next three days, Bush hit the campaign trail in Georgia, North Carolina and New Jersey, among other places. Even Clinton aides acknowledged that in those areas, coverage on local television was “saturation level and nearly all positive for Bush.”

But the networks reported these trips in the context of what his choice of geography and the polls said about Bush’s dire straits.

“It is a measure of how steep a climb Bush has,” Hume reported Tuesday on the decision to campaign in states once considered Republican strongholds.

Clinton’s campaign deftly helped reinforce this perception by sending their man to places Democrats don’t usually go so close to Election Day, such as Colorado, Wyoming, Nevada and, perhaps most tellingly, Orange County.

Bush caused some of his own problems by sending out mixed messages. On Thursday, he muddied his attacks on Clinton by mixing in barbs directed at Perot. He also memorably mangled one of his lines, referring on Thursday to this “lovely recession.”

He also was hurt by an apparent political blunder within his Administration--the revelation in the Washington Post that the State Department had tried to investigate the passport files of Clinton’s mother. That story dominated the network and local news shows Thursday night and was still going strong Friday morning.

The Clinton campaign, meanwhile, continued to campaign in such a way that they scarcely even made the network news with their message--something unheard of so close to Election Day.

On Monday, CBS hit Clinton for a misleading and false radio ad. On Tuesday, he was nailed by all three networks for his answer when asked during the debate if he would pledge not to raise taxes on the middle class. His response was so tangled that it at once sounded fuzzy and eerily similar to Bush’s ill-fated “read my lips” pledge of 1988.

Even his own aides worried privately. “We don’t seem to have a hit of the day,” said one. “I think we are being too tactical in our thinking,” said another.

Still, for the most part Clinton fared well on the news.

One reason was the polls and the media’s fascination with them--an attitude that even one network executive described as “out of control.”

NBC devoted part of its Monday broadcast to a lengthy discussion to what was presented as Clinton’s overwhelming lead in the Electoral College. ABC on Friday suggested that Clinton was clearly ahead in enough states to virtually assure him of 261 of the 270 electoral votes needed for victory. Even more devastating, Bush was not rated clearly ahead in any state, and only marginally ahead in three states with a total of 18 electoral college votes.

Based on these findings, ABC anchorman Peter Jennings suggested only a “political miracle” would save Bush from defeat. Two days earlier, CNN political analyst Bill Schneider said a Bush victory, in light of the current poll numbers, would be “historically unprecedented and politically improbable.”

Clinton has also benefited from a marked increase in coverage of issues by the networks. ABC’s coverage of the candidates’ records on urban policy Tuesday, for example, noted that Clinton had set up more than 400 enterprise zones in Arkansas, while Bush, though on record as supporting such zones, has implemented none.

Finally, Clinton gets positive coverage because he gets huge and enthusiastic crowds. ABC’s Chris Bury did a story about just that on Friday.

Perot, meanwhile, enjoyed virtually no honeymoon in the wake of what most observers considered a strong performance by him in the first and third debates.

As Perot began to move up in the polls, the scrutiny level also seemed to increase. On Thursday, ABC’s Morton Dean did a particularly tough piece suggesting that a claim Perot made during Monday’s debate--that the Vietnamese had tried to have him and his family killed in the early 1970s--was a fantasy.