WASHINGTON -- In a darkened hotel ballroom the other evening, a black-tie audience of Washington's power elite got a sneak preview of President Bush's likely re-election campaign.
It came in the form of a stunning nine-minute videotape of the Persian Gulf war, produced by one of the media masterminds of the hugely successful 1984 Reagan re-election effort.
The flag-waving, gut-wrenching video, rich with action shots of U.S. troops in the desert and punctuated by Mr. Bush's words, was a smash hit with the lobbyists, Pentagon brass and senior government officials at the gala dinner, sponsored by defense contractors as a tribute to the military.
"We're proud of the president," stammered Democratic Representative John P. Murtha, a hulking ex-Marine from western Pennsylvania who was reduced to tears by the production.
How such war scenes will play with the larger audience of American voters a year and a half from now remains one of the big unanswered questions of the 1992 campaign. The Bush campaign's ability to re-create the postwar surge of national pride and confidence in Mr. Bush's abilities as a strong commander in chief could well prove crucial to his re-election, especially if he is vulnerable on issues such as the economy.
Already, the fighting in the gulf and its tragic aftermath have provided the prologue to the '92 race, scrambling the field of likely Democratic challengers and delaying the start of the contest. This week, when former Massachusetts Sen. Paul E. Tsongas becomes the first candidate to formally declare, it will mark the latest beginning to a presidential campaign in nearly a quarter-century. Mr. Tsongas admits he would not be running if other Democrats had been more willing to challenge Mr. Bush.
In the two months since Kuwait was liberated, public attitudes toward events in the Middle East have undergone a dramatic shift. Amid a worsening Kurdish refugee crisis, a recent Gallup Poll found that most Americans now believe that Mr. Bush ordered a cease-fire too soon and that the allies failed to achieve victory over Iraq because Saddam Hussein remains in power.
But Republicans remain outwardly confident that the war has set the stage for Mr. Bush's re-election and possible GOP gains in Senate and House races next year.
The Bush campaign is almost certain to make the war a centerpiece of the re-election effort, using it to anchor the president's foreign policy message and reinforce expected appeals to such politically potent values as patriotism, duty, family, national unity, peace, freedom and national strength.
As the defining moment of Mr. Bush's public career, the war "frames his presidency, which frames the campaign," said Stan Greenberg, a Democratic pollster, who warns that voters are likely to resent any overt attempts to politicize the war.
Analysts in both parties agree that Mr. Bush will have to be careful not to rely too heavily on the issue as a political crutch.
"You can use it to close your case, not to make your case," said Larry McCarthy, a Republican media adviser. "If Bush can break even on every other measure of his presidency and the comparison with his opponent, and at the end wind up with [the war], then I think Bush wins handily."
For Bush strategists, the central challenge will be to rekindle at election time the gush of patriotic pride and upbeat emotions unleashed by the desert war. That task will fall most heavily on Mr. Bush's media advisers, who must find ways to translate the six-month crisis into 30- and 60-second ads.
Although those commercials are still many months away from completion, the video crafted for the April 16 military gala here offers the first tangible evidence of how that might be done. More than 120 hours of war footage were boiled down to nine minutes, and an original soundtrack, complete with country music, was added. Even Democrats were impressed.
"It's a masterpiece. It's obviously the first volley of the Bush campaign," said Raymond D. Strother, a Democratic media consultant, one of several experts who reviewed the video at The Sun's request.
"It's as if it was the first commercial of 1992. It's 'morning in Saudi Arabia,' " said Mr. McCarthy, referring to the famous "morning in America" campaign ads that helped re-elect Ronald Reagan in 1984.
The resemblance is no accident. The gulf video was produced by Phil Dusenberry, chairman of the New York advertising firm of Batten, Barton, Durstine and Osborn, and organizer of the "Tuesday Team," the all-star cast of Madison Avenue admen that produced the 1984 Reagan ads.
Mr. Dusenberry said in an interview that he was assisted in making "the commercial" about the gulf war by Arnold J. Blum, his collaborator on a celebrated 18-minute Reagan film that was shown at the 1984 GOP convention.
In the video, Mr. Bush is shown mingling briefly with the troops in the desert at Thanksgiving, along with his wife, Barbara. But mostly he is an offscreen voice, heard throughout the production: talking about peace, standing up for "what we believe" and "what's right," protecting "innocent lives" and uniting the country, in excerpts taken from his speeches and other public comments during the crisis.
The camera focuses mainly on high-tech military hardware and the men and women who operated it, as well as the worried families they left behind and returned home to in triumph. Because millions of Americans spent the gulf war glued to their TV sets, such images have become a part of the collective subconscious. "Sixty seconds is all the time you need to put the lump in the throat," said Mr. Strother.
Republican consultant Charles Black, one of several top Bush re-election strategists who attended the black-tie dinner at which the video premiered, said it contains "the kind of emotion and memory of the gulf we would like to convey" in the '92 campaign.
Though commissioned for the dinner and underwritten by Textron Inc., a leading defense contractor, the video may also have been an audition of sorts for Mr. Dusenberry. According to Mr. Black, who chairs periodic White House campaign planning sessions, Roger Ailes, Mr. Bush's media consultant, expects to recruit outsiders to join the re-election media effort, and Mr. Dusenberry could well be one of those.
Skeptical Democrats, while conceding the war's emotional impact on the nation, predict that it will be supplanted by other issues before Election Day.
"Even now the memory of the war is receding and the power of it is somewhat receding," said David Axelrod, a Chicago-based consultant. "No one knows exactly how powerful it will be a year and a half after the fact."
"Things become history so much faster than they did in the past," said Brad Johnson, an aide to Democratic Gov. Mario M. Cuomo of New York. "I remember the euphoria I felt when the Berlin Wall came down. We're now as far away in time from that event as we will be from the war in November 1992."
But a close adviser to one Democratic hopeful who has edged away from the presidential race since the war ended says that Democrats who think the war won't help Mr. Bush enormously in 1992 are kidding themselves.
"People like to talk about Churchill," said the adviser, referring to oft-made comparisons between Mr. Bush and the British wartime leader who was rejected by voters once the war ended. "They forget there was no television and no videotape back in World War II."