NEWS ANALYSIS : Competing With Bobbitts and Ice Skaters, Summit Falls Short : Media: Aides’ hopes for enduring images that would capture a nation and strengthen a President fizzle.

As summit trips go--and such events almost always go well--President Clinton’s journey to Belgium, the Czech Republic, Ukraine and Russia has been successful but not spectacularly so, at least as measured through the lens his advisers care most about: newspaper and television coverage.

No enduring images or phrases have emerged from the trip. But Clinton did finish stronger than he began, winning the hearts, or so the press inferred, of the carefully selected and polite Russian citizens he encountered during a walk through Moscow and a town-hall-style television show.

In such events, however, communications strategy and political theater work best in the service of real substance--and here the press thought this summit was lacking.

As the Washington Post complained on Friday: “Summits . . . once were electric affairs. . . . This one . . . seemed almost dull by contrast. The most detailed briefing (Thursday) . . . occurred after the dinner at Yeltsin’s dacha and focused as much on the 26-dish menu, which included lip of moose, as on policy.”

The President’s trip was also matched all week against competing stories: the investigation into Clinton’s Arkansas business dealings as an investor in Whitewater Development Corp.; the trial of Lorena Bobbitt, charged with malicious wounding for cutting off her husband’s penis, and the attack on ice-skating star Nancy Kerrigan. At one point, Cable News Network anchors apologized to the avalanche of callers who complained that the network had broken away from the Bobbitt trial to cover the President.

To the White House, how the summit plays at home--especially on television--is critical. Foreign travel can be a shot of adrenaline for a President’s domestic prestige.

“The trip to Tokyo last year was enormously helpful in passing the budget,” presidential adviser Paul Begala said. “If he (Clinton) had screwed up, the budget would have failed.”

On that scale, this trip had a tough send-off. “This is the most disorganized presidential trip I can remember,” said a veteran White House reporter before leaving last week.

New York Times columnist William Safire wrote that he doubted Clinton had thought enough about foreign policy to have a coherent world view.

And logistics were a problem. The Administration, searching desperately for a photogenic place for Clinton to begin the trip with a speech, had to settle on an undefined audience of young people in the ornate Brussels town hall.

By Thursday, however, the Administration had reversed the press’s skepticism. Even conservative critics were conceding the summit’s successes. “He has done a nice job,” former George Bush Labor Secretary Lynn Martin said on a talk show, adding, “but we tend to overrate summits.”

How much Clinton has helped his image is debatable.

Among the strategists who conceived foreign policy for Bush and Ronald Reagan, the key test of coverage was turning off the sound on the television set and looking for enduring moments or visual images that would register with people who were not paying close attention. Those were the images that would strengthen a President.

There appear to have been none.

For all the elaborately staged pictures, the images highlighted by The Times, the Washington Post and the New York Times featured the President stuffing food or drink into his mouth.

To some extent, the business of creating enduring images has grown more difficult. With the media becoming cynical about staged “photo opportunities,” the television pictures of Clinton walking across the Charles Bridge in Prague highlighted not the President himself but the throng of photographers behind him.

Some of the problem can be blamed on the White House. Clinton made his most important announcement of the trip--that Ukraine would dismantle its nuclear weapons--in front of a North Atlantic Treaty Organization poster--hardly a powerful visual metaphor.

And Clinton’s staff still falls short of the standards set by the Reagan White House for creating images that capture the story the President wants to tell. Reagan’s team knew how to inject seemingly spontaneous events into their boss’ schedule. The press regularly reported these moments because they seemed unrehearsed, even if they weren’t.

Republican television strategist Roger Ailes charged that the media are mostly interested in attacks and gaffes, and that the job of presidential aides is to shield their boss or at least make sure he controls himself. On Wednesday, this White House failed to do either.

The enduring image from Wednesday was of the President abruptly standing up, pulling a wire out of his ear and ending an interview with NBC’s Jim Miklaszewski because the correspondent asked about Whitewater.

“I’m sorry you’re not interested in the trip,” the President snapped.

* DISINTEREST IN WHITEWATER: Most Americans are paying little attention to the Whitewater investigation, a survey found. A17