5-Man, 9-Day Sprint Caps Primary Marathon in N.H. : Democrats: Among Kerrey, Clinton, Brown, Harkin, Tsongas, only 2 or 3 will emerge as viable competitors.

All the months spent handshaking in small-town parlors, all the days spent pleading on college campuses, all the hours spent wheedling on television--for the Democratic presidential candidates, it has all come down to a nine-day sprint.

This week in New Hampshire, a spit of land so small it could be the fingernail on the fist of California, democracy will be played out in all its glory and absurdity.

Town halls will come to life with rapturous applause, and sleepy diners will find their breakfasts interrupted by the candidates and their trailing entourages of cameras and hangers-on. Voters will check their hearts and their heads, and a week from Tuesday, in the nation’s first primary of 1992, send someone forward in victory and leave others grasping for survival.

The winner will be one of five men. Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton first captured the race’s thunder with an aggressive campaign and then unwittingly stole attention from the others as he grappled with a controversy over unsubstantiated allegations of infidelity. Former Massachusetts Sen. Paul E. Tsongas held on to a significant chunk of the electorate in defiance of predictions that he would fold.

Iowa Sen. Tom Harkin and Nebraska Sen. Bob Kerrey struggled for forward momentum, flooding the airwaves with advertisements to stoke the favor of voters who have yet to embrace them. And former California Gov. Edmund G. (Jerry) Brown Jr. tore around the frozen landscape, warmed by outrage and an iconoclastic sense of mission.

By the sliding and wholly subjective scale of expectations and results, two or perhaps even three of the current crowd may be deemed finished off by the morning after the Feb. 18 primary here.

So the Democratic candidates are waiting for lightning to strike, for their campaigns to merge the man and the message well enough to propel them ahead of the competition. The situation is still volatile enough, all agree, that in the words of Kerrey adviser Bill Shore, “this primary victory is really there to be had for anybody.”

As the last surge builds, the urgency was being felt profoundly by the five major Democratic candidates:

* KERREY: The students assembled in a Nashua high school auditorium are fidgeting, even though Nebraska Sen. Bob Kerrey has just begun his speech. But while Kerrey is talking to them, his opening joke is meant for the larger political world that has been watching his quizzical campaign for months now and wondering when, if ever, it will take off:

Two men are out hunting bear. They make camp, finish dinner, prepare for bed. One hunter suddenly grabs for his tennis shoes--a bear is heading for their camp.

“You can’t outrun a bear,” the unshod hunter says. The man with the tennis shoes demurs.

“Let me make it clear,” he says. “All I have to do is outrun you.”

Only scattered laughter erupts, but Kerrey has made his point: He may not come in first, but he means to survive.

Political survival has dictated a shift in Kerrey’s message. Where once he talked almost endlessly about his proposal for government-run national health insurance, he is more careful these days to mix his message and deliver more specifics on the economy.

As the election closes in, Kerrey has also focused his advertising campaign. In two biographical commercials now running on New Hampshire television stations, there are poignant pictures of him as a smiling Navy SEAL, dripping in a wet suit, clearly taken before a grenade took off much of Kerrey’s leg. One of the ads features a picture of Kerrey receiving the Medal of Honor, the nation’s highest military award for valor.

“Courage for a change,” the ad declares.

Kerrey is painting a picture of himself as capable of leading a nation to “fundamental change,” to a common purpose.

“We’ve got to overcome our own desire to be self-indulgent,” he told the Nashua students. “We’ve got to overcome our own desire to want to do it in the easy fashion.”

But his proposed national health insurance plan still is where the candidate’s heart clearly lies, and it is on that subject that he finds his passion. Of late, Kerrey has come to describe health care as a matter of dire economic need.

“As much as anything else, it is a jobs issue,” he tells audiences.

Kerrey has been limited by voter perceptions that his is a one-note campaign, and by a seeming inability to connect emotionally with voters. The other day, for example, he and Clinton spoke back-to-back before the same group of community activists. While Clinton was repeatedly interrupted by applause, Kerrey’s address drew a more muted response.

There are times when Kerrey himself seems to doubt the outcome. The other night, his campaign hastily pulled together a visit to a Manchester restaurant, one of those requisite New Hampshire stops where candidates and diners shake hands over salad and exchange niceties in full view of the television cameras.

This night, however, the television cameras were gone, and Kerrey remained, shaking hands with two elderly women sharing a table.

“You’re better looking than you are on TV,” one said, prompting a blush from Kerrey. She gestured to a handful of reporters and campaign officials. “All of these people follow you around?”

“Just ‘til the 18th,” Kerrey told her. “Who knows after that?”

* BROWN: His campaign opened with Philadelphia’s Independence Hall as its photographic backdrop and last week the Colonial symbolism came full circle: Jerry Brown, encamped in a Nashua bookstore, autographing the booklet whose intellectual fury empowered the American Revolution, Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense.”

But first there was a little business to conduct. Brown peered intently into the lens of a C-SPAN camera.

“Since you’re looking at us, I’m going to repeat that 800 number, 1-800-426-1112,” Brown said, delivering a now-famous pitch for campaign donations. “The last time I was on C-SPAN thousands of people from all over called and I’d like you to call again.

“That’s the way we survive, on your shoulders, so over there on the other side,” he added, peering forward as though he could actually see the viewers, “please help us.”

It has been that kind of campaign for Brown, mixing vaulting revolutionary rhetoric and in-your-face appeals for grass-roots money.

But Brown’s angry message of political corruption and his request that voters join him on a crusade to right democracy has tilted toward tradition recently.

Brown enters the last week of the campaign putting new emphasis on his experience and on proposals that seem pragmatically tailored to please voters here.

One of his chief selling points now is the proposed rebuilding of America’s maritime industry, and he promises to revive first the Portsmouth shipping yard, a port dear to New Hampshire hearts.

And he has shifted his tone on a major theme. Brown used to tout energy efficiency as a way to save the nation money. But now his energy efficiency proposal has become a jobs program--no small change of focus in New Hampshire, where the unemployment rate in December hit 7.8%.

“We could create 10 million jobs over the next 15 years just cleaning up and reducing the waste in energy,” he told several hundred students the other day. “That’s how you put people to work.”

But Brown has by no means stifled his outrage.

Suffering from a nagging cold that he blamed on Los Angeles pollutants, the former governor opened his speech to students at Derry’s Pinkerton Academy with a shrill demand that someone, anyone, tell him what they’ve learned from this presidential campaign.

“They lie,” one student offered.

“They lie!” Brown agreed. “How else can you explain that this planet is being turned into a stinking junkyard by the politicians that run this world. Explain that!”

* HARKIN: Sen. Tom Harkin picked up a piece of chalk and scrawled across the blackboard in boxy capital letters, “Liberal,” “Conservative” and “Moderate.” He wrote several synonyms under the first two words, but looked uncomfortable--even irritated--when he reached the third.

“I’ve often been called a liberal, and I’ve been called a conservative on a few issues,” a shirt-sleeved Harkin told an American history class at West High School in Manchester. “But no one calls me a moderate.”

The truth of these words was evident in New Hampshire last week, as the Iowa Democrat sharpened his attacks on the rivals he calls “Republican wanna-bes.”

In the frigid northern city of Berlin, N.H., Harkin asked a heavily union audience at his Coos County campaign headquarters, “Are you ready to quit apologizing for being a Democrat?” The crowd, some with mittened hands, lustily clapped their approval.

At the Merrimack Valley Day Care Center in Concord, Harkin released an 11-point “children’s trust initiative” that called for increased federal spending for child care, child-abuse prevention, childhood immunization, neighborhood safety, maternal and child nutrition and other initiatives.

Along with the announcement was stapled another sheet, assembled by the Harkin campaign, purporting to describe how several advocacy groups and newspapers rated Arkansas’ record on children’s issues while Bill Clinton was governor. It said that from 1980 to 1988, the state’s ranking had slipped in the rates of infant mortality, low-birth-weight babies, teen-age out-of-wedlock pregnancies and childhood poverty.

“What’s happened in Arkansas is that the children are being left behind,” Harkin told reporters.

Moments later, Harkin thumped Clinton over a newspaper report that Clinton may have missed a 1969 draft call by promising to join a college ROTC program, then backing out. Clinton did not need any more questions about his “character and veracity,” Harkin said, adding pointedly: “In my family, and in my community, and my American Legion Club, you did not shirk your responsibilities. You served your country.”

Harkin took on Kerrey, telling his Berlin audience that Kerrey’s national health insurance plan would cost $246 billion in extra payroll taxes. “You don’t tax people who don’t have jobs,” Harkin thundered.

He did not mention that the Kerrey plan, by making the government the single health insurance payer, would eliminate health insurance premiums and deductibles.

At a time when some candidates were arguing for spending restraint, Harkin turned aside questions about the dangers of the deficit. Pointing to the example of the New Deal and the post-World War II recovery, he said big deficits would not matter if average workers could be given government jobs to reignite the economy.

At the day-care center, he declined questions about the total cost and source of revenue for his childhood assistance program, which came with an unspecified price tag. “The real question,” he insisted, “is, what would it cost us if we didn’t do this? “

* TSONGAS: With the voters and his rivals suddenly taking his candidacy seriously, former Massachusetts Sen. Paul E. Tsongas spent last week trying to prove he could stand up to intense scrutiny--and handle it with presidential toughness.

There was no lack of opportunity. At a speech at Dartmouth College, student environmentalists demanded to know how Tsongas, a cancer survivor, could sit on the board of Boston Edison Co., which owns a nuclear plant that could be carcinogenic. Agitated, Tsongas shot back, “I’ll be glad to discuss energy policy with you, but don’t ever lecture me about cancer.”

Tsongas took shots from his rivals. Sen. Bob Kerrey suggested Tsongas “lacked leadership qualities.” Tsongas was not the business leader he had portrayed himself to be, Kerrey said, but “a lawyer earning a couple hundred thousand dollars a year and serving on a bunch of corporate boards.”

Was Tsongas, a WBZ-TV interviewer asked the candidate, in fact the “fat cat” lawyer that Kerrey described? “Bob, back off; just back off,” Tsongas rhetorically replied to his adversary.

Tsongas said Kerrey was the “last person” in the U.S. Senate who could claim leadership qualities, since he could not get a single co-sponsor for his national health insurance bill. “That’s his bill, that’s his identity,” Tsongas told the Concord Monitor.

The intended message of all these responses was clear: Tsongas, perceived by many as sincere but plodding, can get tough. “If they come at him, he will fight back,” said Peggy Connolly, Tsongas’ press secretary. “He knows how to do it.”

Meanwhile, aides said there were signs more voters were seeing him as man enough for the job. Last Wednesday, $19,000 in checks came in, making it the largest one-day haul for what has been an underfunded campaign. For a 10-day period that ended last Monday, Tsongas had brought in $250,000, as much as he had raised through all of last July, August and September.

And Tsongas’ Boston headquarters, which a month ago was so tranquil that the press secretary sometimes had time to answer her own phone, now bustles with at least 60 workers, triple the earlier complement. Some political analysts and adversaries have predicted that Tsongas’ campaign would falter after New Hampshire for lack of money and organization.

It was a week when Tsongas found himself parrying what he took to be a sneak attack masquerading as a compliment. It came from former President Richard N. Nixon, who was quoted as saying the business-oriented Tsongas was “too responsible” to be nominated by the Democrats.

“When a guy gets moving, you’ve got to shoot him down,” Tsongas joked to a meeting in Nashua of the New England Community Action Assn. “And the best way to shoot a guy down is to get Richard Nixon to say nice things.”

“There are bizarre moments in this campaign, and that would have to be just about at the top of the list,” Tsongas said.

* CLINTON: If Bill Clinton was running at the front of the pack coming into the last week of the primary battle here, he was also gazing protectively at his back.

Clinton’s campaign had two objectives--to inoculate him against charges by the other candidates that his governance of Arkansas was less than stellar, and to set him in voters’ minds as the most presidential of the bunch.

None of the other candidates has yet launched a massive televised strike in Clinton’s direction, but Clinton campaign officials assume one is imminent. “It’s desperation time,” said Clinton’s New Hampshire coordinator, Mitchell Schwartz.

Harkin and Kerrey were honing lines of assault meant to chip away at Clinton’s electability. Kerrey suggested that Clinton’s “lousy” environmental record could prove a boon to Republicans in the fall. He drew a comparison to Bush’s 1988 attacks on pollution in Boston Harbor, which Bush blamed on Democratic nominee Michael S. Dukakis.

Just hours before Kerrey’s words were spoken, Clinton had predicted them and moved to knock them down.

“As we come along to the end here, I think you’ll see more people say Clinton’s not really that good of a governor,” Clinton said.

“Lemme tell you something . . . of all the people running, including the incumbent President, I have gotten up every day for more than a decade and gone to bat. At least I have tried to hit one of America’s problems.

“Have I ever made any mistakes? Yes. I have. They fill this room. But the more decisions you make, the more mistakes you’ll make.”

Even Clinton’s television commercials, which seek to shore up an image of substantiveness, suggest a front-runner playing defense: “This is the real story of Bill Clinton,” says a biographical advertisement, as if warning voters off any other version.

Some voters suggested that Clinton’s efforts to rise above the other Democrats and don the elusive yoke of presidential stature were working. Joe MacIntyre, a Nashua purchasing agent, dropped by Jerry Brown’s book signing the other day to ask the candidate a few questions. He left wondering if a vote for Brown would be wasted, whether he had better vote for the “more electable” Clinton.

“That’s the perception,” he said. “I don’t know if it’s true.”