Economy Focus of Tsongas’ 1992 Bid : Election: Ex-senator says Democratic Party must change, form ties with business. He will announce candidacy for White House this month.

WASHINGTON —  Proclaiming himself “an economic Paul Revere,” former Massachusetts Sen. Paul Tsongas on Thursday dedicated his forthcoming Democratic presidential candidacy to rousing America from the deficit doldrums by forging an alliance between business and government.

Leading the country back to “economic preeminence’ in the world, Tsongas said in a speech at the National Press Club, will require the Democratic Party to expand its objectives beyond its traditional social welfare concerns.

“We must become the party of economic rebirth, of economic nationalism, of economic patriotism, of economic preeminence,” he declared.

“This requires change,” Tsongas said. “It means reaching out to the business community of America. It means partnership.”

Tsongas will not officially announce his candidacy until April 30 in his hometown of Lowell, Mass., when he will become this quadrennial’s first declared presidential candidate. But Thursday’s speech, in which he sketched his domestic policy agenda, effectively marks the belated start of the campaign for the 1992 Democratic nomination.

The competition has been delayed by a combination of factors, particularly the Middle East crisis and the reluctance of prospective Democratic contenders to challenge President Bush at a time when polls show him to be enjoying overwhelmingly positive approval ratings.

But Tsongas said he decided that the current political vacuum offers an opportunity to help him overcome his relative obscurity. “If there were 13 other candidates, I’d get lost in the shuffle,” he said in an interview last week. “I would not have run.”

Tsongas’ bid for the White House represents an attempt to stage a political comeback after a long struggle with lymphoma, a form of cancer that forced him to retire from the Senate in 1984 after serving only one term. He underwent a successful bone marrow transplant in 1986 and claims now to be fully recovered.

“In January, I said (to doctors), ‘Give me every test you have,’ ” he recalled. “I told them what I was thinking of doing. I said: ‘If you don’t think I can do it, tell me now.’ They cleared me.”

Rather than discouraging his candidacy, Tsongas, 50, said that his battle against cancer motivated him to run.

“If you face your own mortality, as I have, you think differently,” he said. “Your values are different, and you have a much greater sense of your responsibilities to your children and to those who came before you. If I had the same mind-set as I had before, I would not run in ‘92--I would run in ’96.”

For all his fortitude, Tsongas recognizes that he faces significant political problems. Because of his Greek heritage and Massachusetts background, he is bound to remind fellow Democrats of the unsuccessful candidacy of the state’s former governor and fellow Greek-American, Michael S. Dukakis, the party’s unsuccessful 1988 standard bearer.

“I’m just going to ask people to judge me on me, not on somebody else,” Tsongas said.

To help establish his political identity, Tsongas has produced an 85-page pamphlet titled “A Call to Economic Arms,” which outlines the intellectual framework of his candidacy and reflects what he says is a more sympathetic view of business than that held by traditional Democrats. Among the ideas it espouses are a targeted capital gains tax cut, tax credits to spur research and development and relaxed antitrust laws to allow U.S. companies to “muscle up” to compete better in world markets.

“No other Democrat knows how to work with business and has the economic background that I have,” Tsongas said. “I grew up in a Republican businessman’s household, so I’m not anti-business by instinct.”

Tsongas was referring to his father, who ran a dry cleaning business in the old Massachusetts mill town of Lowell. Later, as a young lawyer, city councilman and county commissioner, Tsongas was credited with helping local government and business work together to revive the town’s slumping economy.

Tsongas said that a similar approach at the federal level could help offset the damage done by the national debt, which he called “a staggering burden,” and the U.S. trade deficit, which has deprived this country of “control of its economic destiny.”

Although Tsongas did not take a public position on the question of when to use force against Iraq in the Persian Gulf crisis when the issue was before Congress in January, he told the press club audience that he would have voted with most other Democrats to continue sanctions.

In the interview, he insisted that “this was not an illegitimate position to take.” But he also conceded that the U.S. success in the Gulf War had provided Bush “with as strong an issue as any President could have.”

Democratic chances of success in 1992, Tsongas said, will depend on the economy. “If the public perception is that the country is doing fine, no Democrat is going to win or even come close,” he said.