Tsongas Lost His Aura: A Tale of Riches to Rags : Democrats: He won New Hampshire by being above politics. Then he changed strategies and belied his image.

When his rivals for the Democratic presidential nomination were regularly bashing him in televised debates a month ago, Paul E. Tsongas would note with a wink that there were worse things than being attacked--like being ignored.

So it was a sign of trouble that as Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton and former California Gov. Edmund G. (Jerry) Brown Jr. traded roundhouse punches at a candidates’ debate in Chicago last Sunday, Tsongas looked on silently. “Can I get a word in here edgewise?” he finally protested.

It was clear then that the Tsongas story was being rewritten into a tale of rags to riches to rags. The former Massachusetts senator, whose melancholy mien and discomfiting message seemed for a time so right for an anti-political year, was proving unacceptable to average Democratic voters.

The Tsongas candidacy that preached truth-telling and economic revival had done a lot better than anyone expected--but not well enough.

His strengths also were his weaknesses: The lack of money, organization and conventional charisma that lent Tsongas an improbable charm when the campaign was concentrated in New Hampshire proved impossible handicaps when the candidate went national. In one memorable snafu, Tsongas traveled to South Dakota expecting to address the state’s Legislature and ended up at a stockyard instead.

Meanwhile, the cod-liver oil message that New England Democrats willingly swallowed proved more than blue collar and minority Democrats could stomach in the Southern and Midwestern primaries of the last few weeks.

On top of all this, Tsongas made a variety of strategic blunders after his campaign achieved its high point by winning New Hampshire’s Feb. 18 contest.

He said he was above grubby politics one moment, then denounced his rivals the next in ways that belied that image. He decried pandering in one breath, then offered $460 million in tax breaks to small oil producers as the Texas primary approached.

Advisers from rival campaigns also believe Tsongas stretched his already thin resources to the breaking point by trying to compete in too many states immediately after his New Hampshire victory. These advisers say he should have ignored South Dakota and Georgia--where his poor showings served only to defuse his momentum--and focused more time and energy on Florida, his best potential stand in the South.

“He’s done far better than anybody dreamed,” said Greg Schneiders, a political consultant in Washington. “But the campaign couldn’t transcend the problems with the message, and with the messenger.”

For his part, Tsongas insisted Thursday that the problem was neither the message nor the messenger, but a money shortage.

“We simply did not have the resources,” he said in announcing that he was “suspending” his candidacy. Lacking money for television advertisements, “I would have been defined by others and would have been unable to defend myself.”

Tsongas had seemed destined for a gentlemanly middle-of-the-pack showing in New Hampshire--and presumably a quick departure from the presidential race--until allegations of infidelity and draft-dodging sliced Clinton’s lead in early February.

Polls that had showed Clinton ahead by about 10 percentage points found him trailing Tsongas by nearly the same margin a week later. Suddenly, Tsongas was thronged by New Hampshire voters who wanted another look at their dark-horse neighbor.

They warmed to his self-deprecating wit and responded to his message that “hard choices” rather than middle-class tax cuts were needed to revive the nation’s economy. Amid the suddenly flattering press reviews, his aides began joking about “geek chic.”

But even in winning New Hampshire, Tsongas trailed in the expectations game. One poll showed he might beat Clinton in New Hampshire by more than 15 percentage points; he won by 8 points.

On the night of the primary--his greatest moment--he was outflanked by Clinton’s early-evening declaration that his respectable second-place finish made him “the comeback kid.” Clinton’s spin-doctoring made his resurgence at least as big a story as Tsongas’ victory.

Tsongas stumbled less than a week after New Hampshire when an expected easy victory in the Maine caucuses turned into a dogfight with Brown. Brown also upset him in Colorado’s March 3 primary. And Tsongas’ distant finish behind Clinton in the Florida primary on Super Tuesday--March 10--was a major blow.

As Tsongas sought to overcome Clinton’s regional advantage in the Southern primaries that dominated Super Tuesday, he went on the attack in a way many political professionals--including some in his own camp--pronounced a blunder.

In radio ads, Tsongas tried to court the black vote by attacking Clinton for critical comments the Arkansas governor had made about the Rev. Jesse Jackson. On an airport runway in West Palm Beach, Fla., on March 6, he denounced Clinton as a “pander bear” for trying to win the support of Connecticut voters by backing a nuclear submarine program and as “cynical and unprincipled” for a supposed ethnic slur of Tsongas.

In the following days, even while insisting that he was only “counter-punching,” Tsongas kept up his drumbeat of criticism. As press coverage focused on these attacks, Tsongas’ economic message was quickly overshadowed. And in the view of some critics, Tsongas’ counter-punching undermined his appeal as the honest political outsider.

Mark Bisnow, a Tsongas campaign volunteer who was press secretary to independent presidential candidate John Anderson in 1980, said the new approach ran counter to “what created (Tsongas’) aura of authenticity in the first place.”

“He put himself in the hands of the political handlers--these hit men--and they said you’ve got to go on the attack,” said Bisnow.

In his television appearances, Tsongas was talking less about restarting the engine of the American economy and more about outmaneuvering Clinton.

“What voters saw was not about Mr. Smith going to Washington, but about one more politician analyzing campaign strategies,” said Anthony T. Podesta, a Democratic political consultant in Washington.

Other analysts, however, doubt that Tsongas could have stopped Clinton’s advance with any strategy. The insurmountable hurdle he faced, they said, was the limited appeal of his pro-business message to the average wage earners.

After his New Hampshire victory, Tsongas repeatedly said he intended to redirect his appeal to working-class and minority Democrats. But he never connected--as was increasingly apparent as he sought to salvage his candidacy with strong showings in Tuesday’s Illinois and Michigan primaries.

Campaigning in those states, Tsongas did not talk about the hardships of specific workers. Instead, he stuck to his message of the need for capital gains tax cuts and investment tax credits. To many average Democrats, that smacked of the trickle-down economics of the Reagan-Bush era.

The effects of his approach were driven home in Tuesday’s votes. According to Los Angeles Times’ exit polling in Michigan, Tsongas received the votes of only one-in-eight blue-collar workers and only one-in-20 blacks.

“The bottom line is, he couldn’t convert the message from ‘capital formation’ to ‘job creation,’ ” said Podesta. “Capital formation is a great lecture at the Kennedy School (of Government at Harvard), but it didn’t connect with real people.”

Yet even as he announced the suspension of his campaign, the candidate touted the value of his core message, saying he believed it had helped chart “a new path” for his party.

“What we’ve done will last,” Tsongas said in his speech to his supporters. “I don’t think you can say that about everybody who’s run.”

Times staff writers Glenn F. Bunting, Edwin Chen and Thomas B. Rosenstiel contributed to this story.