Tsongas Uses His Obscurity in Bid for Presidency : Politics: So far, he is running in a field of one. This Massachusetts Democrat says he likes it that way.

Paul Tsongas, candidate for President, stands on the stage before a packed gymnasium and steels himself for The Questions.

How can you hope to win when the public sees another Michael Dukakis, someone asks from the audience. Another is even more blunt: What about your health? What about the cancer?

And how about George Bush’s approval rating in the polls? What are you going to do about that?

It’s a tough crowd, considering it consists of high school students.

Tsongas, former U.S. senator, cancer survivor and now presidential candidate, is unfazed. He has heard these questions before and answers the students at Pinkerton Academy almost by rote:

* He is not a Dukakis clone, even if he is a Democrat of Greek heritage from Massachusetts. “I’d be Swedish if I could, but I’m not,” he says.

* The cancer is gone. He swims in national seniors competitions. He challenges Republicans to the 50-meter butterfly. “It takes a lot of courage to be photographed in a Speedo bathing suit when you’re 50 years old,” he jokes.

* Bush’s popularity works to his advantage. “If the President had a much lower popularity there would be 20 people in this race and I would be unnoticed,” he says.

His talk over, the candidate in the pin-striped suit is surrounded by well-scrubbed students in jeans and sweat shirts. They politely ask him to autograph the booklet-size position paper he is handing out.

One of the autograph seekers is asked if he supports Tsongas. “I don’t know, but you never can tell,” he says, studying the candidate’s signature. “It might be worth something someday.”

So goes another day on the frontier of the 1992 presidential campaign, a race right now with a field of one: Paul E. Tsongas.

Others may be testing the waters--Democrats like Virginia Gov. L. Douglas Wilder and Sen. Albert Gore Jr.--but no one, not even George Bush, has stated an intention to run.

No one, that is, except Tsongas, a soft-spoken man of average stature, with thinning hair, who plans to make his candidacy official with announcements on Tuesday in his hometown of Lowell, Mass., and in New Hampshire and Iowa.

The candidate is far from lonely.

“If Cuomo, Bradley and Gephardt were running, I’d be lost in the shuffle and the attempt to change the party’s thinking would be hopeless,” he said in his quiet, analytical way. “This way I have the stage for six weeks in an environment where the issues can be contemplated.”

The issues, as Tsongas sees them, are catalogued in his gray-covered campaign booklet, “A Call to Economic Arms,” an 83-page manifesto that traces the economic decline of the United States and his plan for reversing it.

“The paper,” as he calls it, urges greater government-corporate cooperation, including tax breaks for research and development, a revitalized education system and a return to “national purpose.”

Tsongas refers those who question him about his positions to “the paper” and travels with boxes full of the pamphlets in his car trunk. This has led some wags to suggest that his public appearances seem to be more book tour than political campaign.

Tsongas frowns mildly at the joke, but admits the paper is the centerpiece of his candidacy.

“It’s economics that will determine my fate,” he said.

Many of the ideas in the paper evolved from his 1980 book, “The Road from Here,” which outline his plan for revitalizing the Democratic Party. Then and now, Tsongas believes the Democrats must cool hostilities with big business. Cooperation, he said, means economic growth, which translates into jobs, increased revenues and more funds available for social programs.

Tsongas wrote the book while on the fast track that began at Dartmouth, continued at Yale Law School and then through a series of come-from-behind elections, first as a Lowell City Council member, then county commissioner, two terms in the House and one in the Senate.

He points out to each audience that he has never lost an election, even though each time he went for higher office he was dismissed as a long shot.

“When I ran for Senate (against Edward Brooke, a popular black incumbent Republican) I was dismissed as an obscure one-term congressman,” he told an audience at Harvard. “That got me mad, because I was actually an obscure two-term congressman.”

Self-deprecation is a common characteristic of a Tsongas appearance. He tells audiences that a writer once described him as “terminally earnest.”

“I went home and laid down and tried to figure out if that was good or bad,” he said.

Tsongas’ campaign has brought polite chortles from the crowd of Washington insiders of which he used to be a part. But a closer look finds that his candidacy may not be as quixotic as some believe.

His status as first candidate has brought him a steady stream of invitations to speak at corporate meetings, business forums and other special events.

A dinner and other fund-raising efforts have already collected nearly $300,000, more money than Tsongas had for his first two congressional campaigns. A coterie of former campaign workers and Washington staffers already are working in the campaign, most of them as volunteers.

Still, the Tsongas campaign has a decidedly homemade character.

After his talk at Harvard, Tsongas was surrounded by a polite cluster of people offering their services to his campaign. His helper for the evening, a former congressional aide who now owns a chain of ice cream and yogurt stores, took business cards. To those who had none he handed out tattered index cards to be filled out.

Another former Washington aide, attorney Steve Cohen, drove Tsongas to his Derry appearance in Tsongas’ little white Plymouth.

“The rule is that I don’t normally use my own car,” Tsongas explained, “but everybody else drives a foreign car.”

“I drive a Honda,” Cohen said apologetically, “but I think it’s made in this country.”

A Tsongas speech sometimes has the tone of a lecture on politics and economics, but there are flashes of passion. Selling himself to a Harvard audience, there was a spark of anger in his voice when he said he would not turn the other cheek to slurs or misrepresentations such as those that have marked presidential campaigns.

“I’ll have no trouble fighting back,” he said, drawing applause. “I’m prepared to use the knife as well as the substance.”

And he pounded the podium when he spoke of the notion that the decline of U.S. economic power is inevitable.

“This is a great country and we are a great people, and to watch this nation slide is an insult,” he said, his usual monotone rising to a near shout.

He remains detached when discussing the illness that nearly killed him. Tsongas left Washington and politics in 1984 when doctors told him he had lymphoma, a blood cancer, and might have less than 10 years to live.

When regular chemotherapy and a macrobiotic diet failed to check the disease, doctors persuaded Tsongas to try painful and dangerous bone marrow transplants. He survived the risky procedure and has been healthy for nearly five years.

Tsongas mentions his own illness and treatment in his paper as a metaphor for the tough choices the nation has to make in order to cure its economic maladies. He doesn’t dwell on it in public appearances, other than to put the issue of his health to rest.

Privately, Tsongas says that his recent brush with mortality has made it easier to take a chance and run for President.

“You don’t come away from something like that unchanged,” he said.

“It gives you a longer view than the issue of winning or losing.”