In Like a Lion, Tsongas Still Loves the Roar : Democrats: He took a bold first step into the ring. Now that the spotlight has shifted away, his ideas and ambitions still cast a long shadow.

He was the first Democrat to summon the courage to run for President and the next to last to pull out. And on Sunday it was still a little tough for Paul E. Tsongas to loosen his grasp on the brass ring.

He stood on a chair at Lindy’s deli--no high-priced Manhattan eateries for the frugal Tcitizens for Tsongas--and to the roar of his supporters he pumped his arms in triumph.

It was a gesture reminiscent in a bittersweet way of that night in February when Tsongas, for so long a tortoise in a field of hares, won the New Hampshire primary and nourished the feeble hopes of his underdog fans.

On Sunday, some of the emotion of that long-ago night came sweeping back as Tsongas met with supporters here just half an hour after his arrival from his hometown of Lowell, Mass., where his long-shot presidential campaign began in a drenching rain on April 30, 1991.

“Well, July. New York. A convention--almost,” he said in his wistful way.

Tsongas, the former Massachusetts senator, entered the race for President when George Bush was still riding a tide of post-Persian Gulf War popularity. He was an uncharismatic 51-year-old Greek-American who had survived cancer, and he had no business even thinking of the White House, or so they said.

He won New Hampshire--although Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton took some of the shine off Tsongas’ victory by declaring himself the “comeback kid” for finishing second. He followed with victories in several states, winning 556 delegates before dropping out in late March, out of money and rolled flat by Clinton’s surge.

Tsongas comes to the convention endorsing Clinton, who on Thursday will accept his party’s nomination. But it was not Clinton that Tsongas paid homage to on Sunday; he again trumpeted his message of economic responsibility. He took pains to note that he finished a strong second in the New York primary more than two weeks after he formally bowed out of the race.

“My campaign was a message. It wasn’t just a candidacy. It wasn’t an ego trip. It was a message, and I carried that message as far as money would take us,” said Tsongas, still stubbornly refusing to ponder whether his losses represented a repudiation of his platform.

“A lot of candidates for President come and go, and not many footprints are left in the sand.”

He hopes to leave his own.

Early this year, Clinton defied Tsongas’ economic prescriptions and backed a middle-class tax cut, which he now has dropped in favor of reducing the deficit, Tsongas’ original position. Probable independent candidate Ross Perot recently held up a copy of Tsongas’ book “A Call to Economic Arms” and called it the best economic program he had seen.

A quarter of a million of those books have been handed out, Tsongas told his supporters Sunday, even as some of them queued up with copies for him to sign.

Adulation, even when it is reduced to a few hundred fans lingering in a deli, is a hard narcotic to kick. And Tsongas has not entirely kicked his habit. He said Sunday that he would consider another presidential bid in 1996 if Clinton loses this fall.