Toward a New Hampshire Decision : Democrats: To many, the front-runners do not look like winners.

Determined to learn from their party’s past mistakes, New Hampshire Democrats have concentrated on using this state’s presidential primary to find the candidate with the best chance of winning the White House in November.

But with only two campaign days remaining, they face the frustrating reality that the only two contenders with a realistic chance of finishing first in Tuesday’s balloting would have serious drawbacks in the general election battle against the Republicans.

Former Massachusetts Sen. Paul E. Tsongas, the present front-runner, is little known outside his home base in the Northeast. Moreover, once he becomes better known his past struggle with cancer could stir anxiety among voters worried whether he could stand up to the burdens of the presidency.

As for Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton, the former leader of the field of five major candidates, many analysts believe his once lustrous image has been tarnished by unsubstantiated allegations of infidelity and the controversy over his Vietnam-era draft status. Both problems could undermine his appeal in his native South, which had been expected to help make him a formidable candidate against the GOP.

The concern about Tsongas and Clinton’s electability, and the perceived weakness of the other Democratic contenders, is fueling the campaign to draft New York Gov. Mario M. Cuomo in Tuesday’s balloting and spurring efforts to persuade other leading Democrats to enter the race.

Meanwhile, in the closing days of the campaign, Tsongas, Clinton and their rivals are hoping to gain enough support to demonstrate that they have been greatly underestimated by their detractors.

In keeping with his relatively restrained pace, Tsongas on Saturday limited himself to a speech to a rally of his supporters in Manchester and a lunch at a nearby Greek restaurant. He told the rally that Clinton had raised six times as much money in the last reporting period as his own campaign, that Nebraska Sen. Bob Kerrey had spent three times as much as he had on television ads and that Iowa Sen. Tom Harkin had gotten 10 times as many Statehouse endorsements.

“All we have is a vision,” he said, to the applause of supporters. He pleaded for their help. “I’m asking you not to eat. Not to sleep. To forget you’re married. Ignore your children.”

He devoted the rest of the day to preparing for tonight’s nationally televised debate on CNN.

Campaigning in Manchester on Saturday, Clinton said he had “no predictions” of how well he would do in Tuesday’s voting. “I don’t know,” he said, but “it’s been a victory for me already the way the people have treated me.”

As he campaigned in Manchester, Clinton encountered an 8-year-old girl who approached him to shake hands.

“What’s your name?” he asked.

“Destiny,” she said.

“What a great name,” he replied, “we’ve been looking for you for months.”

Top campaign aides insisted the New Hampshire electorate remains “volatile” and argued Clinton could still narrow the gap with Tsongas if he does well in tonight’s debate.

“It’s hard to make a dramatic impact in a five-person debate,” Clinton strategist James Carville said. But, he added, the debate will be “the last piece of unfiltered information people receive” about the candidates before they vote. “We have the most to gain and the most to lose,” he added.

Bidding for labor support, Harkin held a press conference to protest a plant closing in Dover and addressed a United Auto Workers dinner in Nashua. Working a 12-hour day, Kerrey campaigned through six cities. Despite lagging standings in the polls, “my nature is to never give up,” Kerrey vowed. “My nature is to fight all the way to the end.”

Former California Gov. Edmund G. (Jerry) Brown Jr. addressed a rally in Manchester on behalf of Haitian refugees and went south, to Salisbury, Mass., near the Seabrook nuclear power plant, to reiterate his opposition to nuclear power. The stop was a swipe in the home territory of Tsongas, who supports nuclear power.

The New Hampshire emphasis on electability represents a departure from past contests in which the focus was mainly on issues that concern the various liberal interest groups that customarily dominate the Democratic nominating process. But recent Democratic primary contests have not produced general election winners.

The prolonged recession, particularly severe in New Hampshire, and the consequent drop in President Bush’s standing in the polls have made him seem vulnerable to the right sort of Democratic challenger. “We want to nominate a winner,” says Chris Spirou, state party chairman.

Still another reason for the change was the extremely late start of the campaign, a reflection of Bush’s formidable standings as a result of last spring’s U.S. victory in the Gulf War.

“Because of the late start, activists didn’t have enough time to become attached to the philosophical views or personality of any of the contenders,” said Spirou.

In this wide open environment, Clinton’s candidacy took off. He got an initial boost when a rousing speech to a meeting of state party chairs in Chicago last December won rave reviews around the country. Fund raising boomed and he used his fast growing bank account to fund an expansion of his nascent organization in New Hampshire.

Meanwhile Clinton’s staff distributed several thousand free copies of his “Plan for America’s Future,” a compendium of speech texts and multi-point proposals that contrast to traditional Democratic liberalism by relying on individual enterprise instead of the federal bureaucracy to reach its goals: to “jump start the economy” and “restore the American dream.”

Given this centrist ideology and his presumed support in the South, many party leaders came to see Clinton as the epitome of the electability they so eagerly sought. By mid-January a Boston Globe poll gave him a double-digit lead over Tsongas in the state and to many his nomination seemed all but assured.

Then came the tabloid charges of marital infidelity followed by the allegations that he may have manipulated his draft status to avoid service in Vietnam.

Clinton denied both charges, but his poll ratings plummeted and Tsongas, a relatively familiar figure from nearby Massachusetts who had campaigned here longer than anyone else, moved out front.

“Tsongas doesn’t have any problems,” said Michael Garofalo, a Salem coin dealer who cheered the former Massachusetts senator at a “town meeting” here last week. “Clinton’s only big plus was electability, and with all his problems, it’s not a plus for him anymore.” Clinton’s strategists claim their man can make a comeback by dint of all-out campaigning in the closing days of the race. And they insist that even a second-place finish, though it would represent a comedown from last month’s expectations, would assure him a clear path to the nomination because of the weakness of the other contenders.

“We have terrific infrastructure,” said Mickey Kantor, the Los Angeles lawyer who heads the national executive committee of the Clinton campaign. “We have a couple of million dollars in the bank and we’re in great shape.”

But some analysts see trouble ahead for Clinton even in his native South. “He’s going to have the same problems here that he would anywhere else, particularly over the draft,” said John Patton, a Tulane University specialist in political communication.

Patton noted that in a 1969 letter released last week, the then 23-year-old Clinton said he had decided not to become a draft resister, even though he was passionately opposed to the war in Vietnam, “for one reason, to maintain my political viability within the system.”

“A lot of people picked up on that,” said Patton. “It makes him sound very opportunistic and together with the infidelity charge it could hurt him. I don’t think people are prepared to write him off. But it makes it an uphill struggle for him.”

Meanwhile as Tsongas has climbed in the polls, he has made his own case for electability based on his “pro-business” approach to reviving the economy, spelled out in detail in his 86-page “A Call to Economic Arms,” autographed copies of which he hands out at every stop.

“I think of all the Democratic candidates I have the strongest appeal among Republicans,” he told reporters last week. “My economic package would bring in Republicans.”

Because of his claimed economic expertise, Tsongas also contends he would stand up better to Bush in a debate than other Democrats.

Tsongas’ initial drawback in the post-New Hampshire arena is his relative obscurity. That would be overcome if he were to continue to win. But success would bring him new problems. “The more he looks like a front-runner the more his physical health will come under scrutiny,” said Merle Black, Emory University specialist in Southern politics.

Tsongas has acknowledged health is a major issue he must overcome.

“If Bill Clinton looks tired, it doesn’t mean anything to anybody,” he says. “If I look tired, people say, what’s going on?”

Tsongas has tried to persuade voters he is physically fit with commercials in which he is shown swimming with a powerful butterfly stroke.

Although his doctor insists his stamina is good, Tsongas has this week fielded many questions about his light schedule of public appearances, and a nagging cough. Neither is a result of any physical weakness, aides say.

Tsongas will appear in the debate tonight wearing eyeglasses because some particle struck him in his left eye during a factory tour Thursday. Now, the redness has spread to both eyes.

CNN to Televise Candidate Debate

The Democratic presidential debate sponsored jointly by the League of Women Voters and CNN will be televised live Sunday at 5 p.m. on CNN. Bernard Shaw will be the moderator. Radio listeners can tune into KCRW 89.9 to hear the 90-minute debate live from Manchester, N.H.

Times staff writers David Lauter and Paul Richter contributed to this story.