Tsongas Makes Campaign Stop Minus the Glitz : Politics: Democrats’ only announced presidential candidate visits L.A. and wonders when someone else will join the field.

The business cards are still at the printer. There are no slick bumper stickers or brochures, unless one counts the 85-page volume with the hefty title--”A Call to Economic Arms”--passed out at the door.

The Paul Tsongas presidential campaign lurched into Los Angeles this week, with more of a city council flair than one befitting, in his words, the world’s supply of Democratic presidential candidates. It was also, in one of the capitals of political glitz, the closest thing to retail presidential politics that the state has seen in years.

No glittery Beverly Hills campaigning here; the sound heard at Tsongas’ reception Wednesday night--a day after his official announcement--was not the clinking of champagne flutes but the roar of jet engines careening over the Airport Hyatt near LAX. Unlike the high-priced gatherings that dominate politics here, this one was free to all.

There were benefits to the low-tech style: A wide-eyed college kid, seeing a notice in the newspaper, had sped down from Pepperdine University to meet the former Massachusetts senator. The student and everybody else got to do just that.

Tsongas, between nervous jokes and earnest proclamations on the issues, alternately excoriated his fellow Democrats for their approach and begged them to join him in the race.

“It does not speak well for us that I am the only one that’s out there,” the 50-year-old candidate said, meaning no disrespect to himself.

This being Los Angeles, some disrespect was tendered anyway. After an ill-attended news conference, a tired Tsongas arranged to speak to one television station live. The interview took place, albeit later than the campaign had desired.

While Tsongas waited for his turn, the station ran a longer live interview with another public figure--Daniel Ramos, the Boyle Heights teen-ager who spray-painted “Chaka” more than 10,000 times across the Southland before his sentencing on vandalism charges earlier this week.

Earlier, during the reception in his honor, Tsongas had stood by, a quizzical look on his face, as one guest demanded his reaction to there being “a criminal in the White House” who had engineered “the suspension of the Constitution.”

“I’ve always been in favor of the Constitution,” he said wryly.

Los Angeles, which Tsongas departed early Thursday, was the latest stop in the first presidential candidate’s announcement swing, which began in his home town of Lowell, Mass., and coursed through familiar campaign territory of New Hampshire and Iowa before heading west.

At a news conference and the reception attended by more than 100 guests, he repeated his campaign staples--that Democrats have to change their tune on economic policy or face defeat, that voters have to recognize the country’s economic “peril” and that President Bush has to be held accountable for the economic slide despite his current popularity.

On business issues, Tsongas splits the difference between Republican and Democratic positions. He favors a reduction in the capital gains tax, for example, but not one as broad as Republicans support. He supports the proposed fast-track free trade agreement with Mexico and said Democratic efforts to derail it were “not in the national interest.”

Blunt spoken, he said Democrats have to decide “once and for all” if they want to win elections.

“The reason people turn away from the Democratic Party is that in their gut, they don’t believe we know how to run the economy,” he said.

Not surprisingly, Tsongas is running as an outsider, a strategy born of his distaste for some Democratic orthodoxy and his base outside Washington’s sphere of influence. He retired from the Senate in 1985, returning to Massachusetts to seek treatment for lymphoma. The cancer was treated with a bone marrow transplant in 1986, and Tsongas is approaching the five-year anniversary on which he will be considered cured.

Tsongas’ entry into the race against Bush, whose popularity has made other Democrats reluctant to commit to a presidential bid, has prompted a growth industry for comics who compare him to the last Greek-American to run for president, Michael S. Dukakis. With an edge to his voice, Tsongas cracked that he “ought to claim a royalty fee for the humor that I’ve provided to Jay Leno.”

As campaigns go, the former senator’s is embryonic. Tsongas as of Thursday had 14 paid staff members, with most having joined the rolls in the previous 24 hours. Repeatedly, the candidate asked for patience in laying out specifics of his proposals. Without a staff, he said, he was catching up on some issues.

So far, he has collected about $350,000 in donations. In stark terms, that is enough to fuel election commercials in the high-priced Los Angeles television market for less than three days, media buyers say.

While campaign officials presume that fund raising will pick up in the wake of his announcement, even those who showed up to support Tsongas during his Los Angeles visit questioned whether he could generate the enthusiasm that once greeted Dukakis.

As the first Greek-American to seek the presidency, Dukakis was “able to create an emotional stimulus,” said Nikolas Patsaouras, president of the Southern California Rapid Transit District Board of Directors and a key Dukakis associate.

“It’s a wait-and-see attitude,” he said of Tsongas. “He has to create the momentum before people will jump on the bandwagon.”

The constant comparisons with Dukakis already are prompting Tsongas to plead for more Democrats to enter the race, both to take on Bush and to take pressure off himself.

“As long as I’m the only one out here, I’m always going to be asked about Michael Dukakis,” said the other Greek-American from Massachusetts.