TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/062491/0624101.000

Text File | 1992-10-19 | 12.0 KB | 241 lines

                ympA                                                      ╚NATION, Page 19

THE DEMOCRATS

It's Tsongas -- With a T


Why is an obscure ex-Senator from Massachusetts risking ridicule
by running for President? Because he thinks he's an economic
Paul Revere.

By ROBERT AJEMIAN/BOSTON


    Paul Tsongas has a sad, hurt look. On the podium he is a
limp performer who often slurs and swallows his words.
Afterward he has to brace himself for insinuating questions
about another Greek politician from Massachusetts, the tattered
Michael Dukakis. On top of all that, Tsongas must assure voters
he has really licked the cancer that led him to retire from the
U.S. Senate seven years ago. Why on earth is this man running
for President?

    All his political life, Tsongas, now 50, has taken people
by surprise. He is an odd politician. On the surface he is
almost mushy. He rarely loses his temper or even raises his
voice. So it is something of a shock to discover that
underneath, Tsongas (pronounced song-us) is highly opinionated
and hard as nails. What you see is not what you get.

    In 1978 he dared to challenge Edward Brooke, the country's
only black Senator, and beat him. Two years later, he flabber
gasted the ultra-liberal Americans for Democratic Action by
telling the organization its brand of liberalism was dead. In
1984 he suddenly walked away from the Senate. He wanted to be
home with his family while undergoing cancer treatment. Two
months ago, Tsongas sprang yet another shock. Out of the blue,
he became the first -- and so far only -- Democrat to declare
for President. Right in character, he announced his candidacy
at the height of George Bush's popularity.

    His goal is to sound an emergency alarm. America is
sinking into economic peril, warns Tsongas. In the new ruthless
international marketplace, American products are not selling.
The country's manufacturing base is shot, jobs are disappearing
by the thousands, our standard of living is eroding. The result:
the very fabric of America's social order is under threat. "The
larger dangers are here, not in Iraq," says the candidate.

    Calling himself the economic Paul Revere, Tsongas says
American business must be better nurtured, workers must be
better trained, companies must be urged to think of long-term
development rather than quick profits. Furthermore, Tsongas
charges, the Republican mania for free markets is dangerously
out of date. Today foreign governments keenly nourish their own
private industries. "American companies," says Tsongas, "need
the U.S. government as a full partner."

    Tsongas is even harder on his own party. Americans simply
do not trust Democrats to run the economy, he declares. "For
Democrats to insist that they are pro-jobs and also antibusiness
is obsolete," the candidate repeats at every stop. His solution:
Democrats must stop bashing business. Says Tsongas: "Democrats
have been famous for dividing the pie fairly. Now there's no pie
left. So Democrats must learn how to produce wealth."
Businessmen, he tells his listeners, badly need a
capital-gains-tax reduction, tax credits for new investments,
the elimination of quarterly reports that encourage short-term
thinking. Last winter Tsongas spent two months writing an
encyclopedic, 85-page treatise that is the core of his campaign.
The title of his book: A Call to Economic Arms.

    Supply-siders excluded, many economists applaud the
Tsongas message, though some fear he is kindling economic
nationalism. A number of union leaders consider Tsongas a
turncoat, even though his voting record over the years has been
prolabor. Democratic elders are warily assessing public
reaction. Potential presidential candidates, such as Iowa
Senator Tom Harkin, are already sniping at Tsongas. Instead of
more tax breaks for greedy businessmen, they complain, why not
more of them for the middle class? Tsongas labels such criticism
myopic. Only business can bake a bigger pie.

    Audiences in Iowa, where the first nominating caucuses
will take place next February, have rarely heard a Democratic
candidate utter such heretical words. Many bob their heads in
approval. If Tsongas seems bland, his words are not. Ten years
ago, he explains, he made similar speeches but no one listened.
"There are moments in history when ideas catch fire," Tsongas
says. "Back then I lit a match and nothing happened. Now
gasoline is all over the floor." His own liberal voting record
takes much of the sting out of the blunt talk.

    Aloof and sometimes quirky, Tsongas is a man who wastes
scant time on political heartiness. "He gives little feedback,"
says one of his top aides. Escaping political orthodoxy appeals
to him. The higher a person's standing, staff members say, the
more likely Tsongas is to ignore him. He is incapable of
rudeness, but there are glints of social defiance in his nature.
In nine years in Washington, Tsongas says, he never held a
dinner party. The Senator needs few people aside from his wife,
Niki, and three daughters, Ashley, 17, Katina, 13, and Molly,
9. He is fanatically devoted to his family. "Otherwise," says
a longtime member of his staff, "it's almost like he exists
alone."

    There is a moralistic streak in Tsongas. His speeches are
apt to include denunciations against those "who ought to be
ashamed of themselves." In conversation, his comments, no matter
how calmly uttered, can have a know-it-all ring. He is
sometimes referred to behind his back as St. Paul. Still, he
does not close off argument and is willing to change his mind.
Unlike most Democrats, he supports nuclear power. His conversion
occurred after experts convinced him of the lasting, dire
effects of oil and coal on the environment.

    Tsongas and Dukakis keep a friendly distance. After
Dukakis appointed him chairman of the state board of regents,
Tsongas publicly criticized the Governor's education cuts.
Dukakis was startled. The two men are mostly unalike. Tsongas
has an easy sense of humor and is far less stiff around people.
His ready quips are regularly turned on himself. Often he tells
audiences he is thinking of becoming a Swede. Tsongas rarely
holds grudges. When staffers urge him to retaliate against
renegers, he usually waves them off.

    How the man from Lowell picked up such vast
self-confidence is a mystery he is at a loss to explain. His
youth, Tsongas remembers, was mostly not a happy one. He never
knew his mother, who suffered from tuberculosis and lived in a
sanatorium. One day young Paul, age 4, was driven to see her.
A ghostly figure, Katina Tsongas, gazed down from an upstairs
window and waved to her son. He never saw her again. She died
when Paul and his twin sister, Thaleia, were seven. A
grandmother, whom the children soon called Ma, took her place.

    Thin and small, socially unsure, the young Tsongas spent
most of his free hours toiling in his father's dry cleaning
store. There he bent wire into countless coat hangers and served
behind the counter. "Paul was introverted," Thaleia recalls.
"His identity comes from within himself."

    At Dartmouth College, his narrow life continued. "I wasn't
up to joining a fraternity," he recalls. Instead he fixed his
mind on an impossible goal: he would win a swimming letter.
Tsongas practiced maniacally. His senior year he got a varsity
letter. It was his first real success.

    After graduation in 1962, Tsongas joined the Peace Corps
and spent two years in an Ethiopian village. The experience, he
says, was the most compelling of his life. "For the first time
ever," says Tsongas, "people liked me." He taught at a rural
school, helped students build a dormitory, raced his horse on
the village's main street. Then at Yale Law School, Tsongas
remembers, he was miserable all over again. The change from
village life to law libraries somehow depressed him. The Yale
years, Tsongas says, were the unhappiest period of his life.

    He returned home to Lowell, its red brick textile mills
having long ago deteriorated, to practice law. In 1969 he ran
for the city council and won. Elected as a reformer, he began
to show a more forceful side. Soon he was bucking the city's
seedy political hierarchy, whose members openly ridiculed him.
Tsongas discovered the abuse did not intimidate him. Gradually
he won respect. Elected to Congress, he helped secure large sums
of government money that spurred Lowell's dramatic revival.

    He jostled some. Former city manager Bill Taupier
remembers the Senator sticking his nose into everything. "Things
had to be his way," says Taupier. But by then little could dim
the Tsongas luster. He was riding high. In Washington he was a
member of the Senate's prestigious Foreign Relations Committee.
In Lowell he was the city's first citizen.

    One September morning in 1983, his life stopped in its
tracks. Showering, Tsongas discovered a lump in his groin. It
was diagnosed as lymphoma. Even though that kind of cancer is
normally responsive to treatment, Tsongas decided to leave the
Senate.

    In 1986 his doctor, Tak Takvorian, proposed a radical new
bone-marrow transplant. Five percent of his bone marrow was
withdrawn by needle, purged of cancer cells and frozen. Tsongas
remembers the day his doctor appeared holding the good marrow
in a test tube. There was his life, Tsongas thought, pressed
into a tube. What if the doctor dropped it? The cleansed marrow
was reintroduced into his body. In an isolated room at the
Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, Tsongas waited six weeks
for the result. The transplant worked.

    Today Tsongas measures time from that September morning in
the shower. The first day of each month he enters the elapsed
time into his calendar. This June he reached 2,804 days.
Doctors say there is little likelihood the cancer will return.
Politically, the issue is far from settled.

    Free of cancer, his economic themes set into a book,
Tsongas gathered his family in the early part of the year and
told them he wanted to run. No other Democrat, he was convinced,
would risk the unpopular economic argument that had to be made.
But if a single member of his family objected, Tsongas would
drop the idea. His wife, a vibrant woman with a law practice of
her own, urged him to do it. She would help. His daughters
agreed.

    Now Tsongas sits on the long wooden porch of his Victorian
house in Lowell. At ease in a red sports shirt and running
shoes, he seems oddly disengaged from his enormous undertaking.
His mind turns to the campaign. "Where are the rest of them?"
he asks about rival Democratic candidates. "Here I am, a
has-been, all alone." Public argument will help him become
better known. What about the lack of political flair? Tsongas
is asked. "I have obvious problems," he says. But Tsongas does
not invest much concern in the dynamics of leadership. He
believes politics is driven by ideas, not style. Nor do the
organizational needs of a campaign hold his interest. Tsongas
delegates broadly. With a certain satisfaction, he says he
doesn't even know the people who are running his state campaigns
in California and Iowa.

    It is late at night, and Tsongas sits alone in his living
room. His golden retriever, Martha, is asleep by the front door.
Tsongas is asked if he thinks much about actually being
President. He answers yes, he has even thought about a Vice
President and certain Cabinet members. Then Tsongas stops and
makes a point. "I'm not running to be President," he says of his
quest. "I'm running to spread this message."

    It is a curious distinction. Somehow Tsongas has managed
to disconnect ambitions that have always seemed inseparable.
For the moment, the message is what really matters. Either his
ideas are vital to the country, Tsongas says, or he will go down
in flames. Until that becomes clearer, he will stay resolved.
"I must not do what Democrats usually do," he says, "and bend
to special interests. I am the message. If I bend, I have no
message."