Tsongas Feeling the Heat as His Standing in Polls Rises : Politics: Harkin turns his attack on ex-senator from Massachusetts. Clinton tries to get his campaign on track with an emphasis on issues.

To the front-runner go the crowds--and the attacks. So for Democrat Paul E. Tsongas, the heat has begun to rise along with his standing in the polls.

Tsongas, the former Massachusetts senator, was attacked Thursday by Iowa Sen. Tom Harkin, who accused him of misleading voters about his environmental credentials. He also came under scrutiny from news organizations examining his work over the last seven years as a lobbyist for major corporations.

Meanwhile, Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton, the former front-runner in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, continued to try to lift his campaign from the ditch after three weeks of questions about his personal life and his Vietnam-era draft status.

And Nebraska Sen. Bob Kerrey, still looking for a theme that might animate his moribund campaign, aired a new advertisement arguing that voters should choose him because unlike the other contenders, he has no apparent political negative qualities.

Former California Gov. Edmund G. (Jerry) Brown Jr., campaigning in Portsmouth, accused Bush of “bureaucratic neglect,” by failing to break a deadlock within the Army Corps of Engineers over redeveloping the port into a major shipping center.

“Trade with Eastern Europe and the former republics of the Soviet Union can be a rich source of American jobs if only our President takes the lead in restoring American shipping and maritime power,” Brown said.

As the campaign moved into the final 100 hours before Tuesday’s opening primary of the year, Clinton bought half an hour on the state’s most-watched news station for a program in which a group of undecided voters chosen by an independent polling organization questioned him about various issues.

For the campaign, the appearance achieved one major goal--getting Clinton before the public talking about something other than allegations about his personal life or the Vietnam-era draft.

Moreover, Clinton’s aides have long felt his greatest strength is detailed knowledge of issues that he displayed as he answered questions on such subjects as health care, home foreclosures, education and economic policy.

For weeks, Harkin, who relishes the role of brawler in the Democratic field, has pounded away at Clinton’s record in Arkansas. Thursday, however, he stopped--saying of Clinton that “it looks like his campaign may be doomed”--and, instead, opened fire on Tsongas.

Harkin traveled to Seabrook, the site of a controversial nuclear power plant, to denounce Tsongas as a “cheerleader” for nuclear power. “I just don’t know how you can be for nuclear power and call yourself an environmentalist,” Harkin said. “You just can’t have it both ways.”

Tsongas fought back, questioning Harkin’s own record on energy policy, and tried to portray the hard-hitting Iowa senator as desperate in the campaign’s final days.

“There are nuclear power plants in Iowa; there’s no record of Harkin saying ‘boo’ to any nuclear power plant there,” Tsongas told reporters during a stop at the Concord Steam Corp., a steam-generating utility.

Tsongas, who was endorsed by a group of New Hampshire environmental groups three weeks ago, has said he believes nuclear energy must be one of several national energy sources. He acknowledges that the current generation of plants has major safety and waste-disposal problems.

Tsongas said Harkin had waited until less than five days before the Tuesday primary to raise the issue.

“Cynicism is part of the process, but this is a new art form,” Tsongas said. “What you have here is a candidate not doing well.

“I would hope the cynicism he is trying to exploit would rebound against him,” Tsongas said. “Tom has spent a lot of time criticizing me, and criticizing Gov. Clinton, and maybe he would be a lot better off spending his time developing a good economic program.”

Clinton sounded a similar note. “Tom Harkin spends a lot of time in New Hampshire and all around the country running me down and all his other opponents down, and I don’t think it makes him a bigger man,” Clinton said.

Harkin, Clinton added, “hasn’t been able to get anybody to buy onto his message, so he’s just running the rest of us down.”

Clinton used most of his half-hour broadcast to stress his economic message. But he also addressed two of the nagging concerns that have cost him support.

When asked about Vietnam, Clinton said he hoped the election could become an opportunity “when we could finally put it behind us.”

And on the question of whether he could still win an election against President Bush, Clinton told the voters who quizzed him that “if you say I’m electable on Tuesday, by definition, I’m electable.”

At least one of those voters, Bob Dawson, a 29-year-old teacher from Manchester, said he had been swayed. “I’m a Democrat who’s scared to death about electability,” Dawson said, adding that he had arrived at the broadcast studio planning to write in New York Gov. Mario M. Cuomo’s name on the ballot Tuesday, but had changed his mind.

Clinton strategists hope tens of thousands of voters outside the studio will share Dawson’s reaction and have scheduled a second half-hour broadcast--a voter call-in show--for today.

In recent years, lengthy broadcasts of this sort have proved effective in swaying undecided voters, a group that polls have shown may include more than half the likely primary turnout. Bush, for example, greatly boosted his chances in the New Hampshire primary four years ago with a 15-minute broadcast in the last weekend of the campaign featuring him and former Sen. Barry Goldwater of Arizona.

Such broadcasts have proved particularly useful at late stages in elections. In this case, New Hampshire voters already have been deluged by saturation news coverage and ads from 10 different major and minor candidate-spots running at the rate of 150 per day.

But strategists for other campaigns agree that if Clinton fails to reverse his slide in the polls, Tsongas almost certainly will emerge from Tuesday’s vote as the winner.

In fact, even before Clinton’s broadcast ended, tracking polls showed that over the last 24 hours, he has been rebounding from the deep slide of last week.

Tsongas repeatedly insisted that he considered Clinton a “very viable candidate,” noting that Clinton had raised six times as much money as Tsongas in the last reporting period.

Tsongas said he was increasingly confident of a strong showing that would enable him to take his thinly funded campaign to other primary states. The only concern he has had about the campaign’s success “was money. But this momentum of the last three weeks has changed that,” he said.

Tsongas spent much of the afternoon preparing for the final televised candidate debate that is scheduled for Sunday.

“The debate is going to be where they come after me, and I want to be ready for it,” he said.

Times staff writers Ronald Brownstein, Thomas Rosenstiel and Paul Richter contributed to this story.

DEMOCRATIC INSIDER: Tsongas has been the ultimate insider--the Washington official-turned-lobbyist. A36