Former Sen. Tsongas Declares Candidacy for Presidency : Politics: He is the first Democrat to announce entry into the 1992 race. After a bout with cancer, doctors say his lymphoma is in remission.

Former Massachusetts Sen. Paul E. Tsongas declared his candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination Tuesday, officially launching a 1992 campaign season delayed by the Persian Gulf War and Democratic anxiety over the party’s prospects against President Bush.

Before a hometown crowd of several hundred supporters who gathered outside a refurbished textile mill in a steady rain, Tsongas described his campaign as a “journey of purpose.”

“I commit myself to making this country a striving, thriving, triumphant competitor in the world marketplace,” he said. “I commit myself to an America where our standard of living, our educational and health care systems and our industrial output are second to none.”

In his appearance here, and later speeches to small gatherings in Manchester, N.H., and Des Moines, Iowa--the states where the first major tests in the race will come next February--Tsongas stressed environmental and economic themes in a tone more earnest than impassioned. He criticized Bush for a “generationally immoral” federal debt and “cynical avoidance” of such environmental problems as global warming.

“Today we plant the seeds of America’s economic renaissance,” he told the crowd in Lowell.

Tsongas, 50, last sought elective office in 1978, when he won a Senate seat in Massachusetts. He retired after one term when he was diagnosed as suffering from lymphoma, a cancer of the lymph glands. He underwent a difficult bone marrow transplant in 1986, and now his doctors say his cancer is in complete remission.

Though Tsongas has described himself as a long-shot candidate, some activists warn against underestimating him, insisting he could impress Democratic voters as a serious and innovative thinker. “He is a thoughtful, classy guy,” said Brad Bannon, a Boston-based Democratic pollster. “He will add substance and weight to the debate.”

In his announcement speech, Tsongas called his battle with cancer the beginning of his “own journey” toward his candidacy. “During that adversity, I derived a deeper faith . . . and a commitment to devote myself to those people and to those issues that truly matter to me,” he said, as his wife and three daughters sat beside him.

To demonstrate his recovery, Tsongas recently challenged any of his opponents to a swimming race. Right now, he would have the pool to himself. Though several other Democrats--including Virginia Gov. L. Douglas Wilder, Tennessee Sen. Albert Gore Jr., New York Gov. Mario M. Cuomo, Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton, and two-time candidate Jesse Jackson--are believed to be assessing the race, none have yet publicly announced a decision to run.

At this point in 1987, four Democrats had already declared their candidacies for the party’s nomination. But advisers to the other potential 1992 candidates say Tsongas’ entry is unlikely to significantly accelerate this year’s lethargic schedule, unless his candidacy suddenly and unexpectedly catches fire among Democratic activists and fund-raisers. Most Democrats consider it more likely that the full slate of candidates will not emerge until fall.

For now that gives Tsongas an open field to market his ideas, which range from the familiar to the idiosyncratic.

In his speeches Tuesday, Tsongas stuck mostly to broad generalities, calling on the nation to begin “thinking in generations” about the long-term implications of policy, and warning of fundamental economic decline.

“We were never meant to be the world’s greatest debtor nation,” he said, echoing familiar Democratic themes from the 1988 campaign. “We were never meant to have our ancestors’ patrimony sold to the highest foreign bidder.”

Though he discussed few ideas specifically Tuesday, Tsongas has laid out a detailed platform in an 85-page pamphlet entitled “A Call To Economic Arms.” In it, he supports a capital gains tax cut for long-term investment, more government support for both solar and nuclear power, annual increases in the gasoline tax to encourage energy conservation, strengthening United Nations peacekeeping forces and the World Court, the launching of a second Marshall Plan to aid the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, and, above all, an aggressive industrial policy to spur innovation and growth.

This eclectic combination of proposals may reflect Tsongas’ own unusual political pedigree.

His father, Efthemios, who ran a successful dry cleaning business in Lowell, was a staunch conservative, and Tsongas’ earliest political involvements was as a Republican. But Robert F. Kennedy’s 1968 presidential race helped inspire him to switch parties, and after winning local offices in Massachusetts and serving as a deputy assistant attorney general for the state, Tsongas won election to the House of Representatives as part of the huge Democratic class of 1974.

After serving two terms in the House, Tsongas won his Senate seat, ousting black Republican Edward W. Brooke, who had been weakened by personal problems. Since leaving office, Tsongas has worked in a leading Boston law firm, Foley, Hoag & Eliot, and joined more than a dozen corporate and nonprofit boards.

During his term in the Senate, Tsongas was a visible figure in the generation of younger “neo-liberal” Democrats looking for alternatives to traditional party approaches. Reliably liberal on most foreign policy and social issues, Tsongas, like such Senate contemporaries as Gary Hart and Bill Bradley, sought new directions on domestic policy.

In a widely reported 1980 speech to the liberal group Americans for Democratic Action, Tsongas declared that “liberalism will decline and . . . should decline” if it did not reform.

The concerns of those early 1980s internal party debates still reverberate through Tsongas’ speeches. Some of his proposals, such as his call for a government industrial policy, reprise ideas that were more hotly debated when he was still in the Senate.

That’s led some Democrats to question whether Tsongas’ platform--which he describes as “pro-business liberalism”--really represents a new direction. “Tsongas was one of the first to come out and critique the Democratic Party,” said Bruce Reed, policy director at the Democratic Leadership Conference, an organization of centrist Democrats. “But there isn’t much in what he’s talking about that wasn’t floated and discarded five or six years ago.”

In an interview Tuesday, Tsongas acknowledged: “I have some catching up to do on issues because of my absence.”

For Tsongas, finding an audience for his unconventional mix of ideas may be less challenging than convincing many Democrats even to give a serious hearing to another Greek-American liberal from Massachusetts, while the memory of Michael S. Dukakis’ collapse in 1988 remains so vivid.

Between campaign stops, Tsongas called his most immediate campaign problem “remembrance of another Greek from Massachusetts. I will still be subject to Jay Leno humor for a while.”

Tsongas continues his five-day, nine-city announcement swing today with a luncheon appearance in Denver and a 5:30 p.m. rally at the Airport Hyatt in Los Angeles.

PAUL E. TSONGAS

Born: Feb. 14, 1941

Hometown: Lowell, Mass.

Education: BA (history), Dartmouth College, 1962; Yale Law School, 1967

Career highlights: Peace Corps volunteer in Ethiopia, 1962-64; deputy assistant attorney general in Massachusetts, 1969-71; private attorney, 1971-74; U.S. representative from Massachusetts, 1974-78; elected to U.S. Senate, 1978, served one term; attorney, 1985-present.