Democrats Kick Off 1992 TV Advertising Campaigns : Election: Clinton and Tsongas air messages in New Hampshire, with rivals soon to follow. Spots force candidates to focus their ideas.

They’re back--with their inspirational background music, their cameras slowly panning into close-up and their relentless promises of national revival.

The 1992 advertising campaign for President has been joined.

Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton aired his first television commercial in New Hampshire on Thursday, an ad in which he talks directly into the camera and offers to send voters a copy of a plan he has been touting to revive the national economy. Among other things, the plan calls for a tax cut for the middle class, a national health care proposal and development of a long-term industrial investment program.

Former Massachusetts Sen. Paul E. Tsongas also went on the air Thursday in New Hampshire--site of the first national primary Feb. 18--with a biographical ad promoting his record in the Senate. It is his second commercial of the campaign.

Nebraska Sen. Bob Kerrey, meanwhile, is expected to air his first ads today, one on health care and perhaps a second on economics, according to sources.

And Iowa Sen. Tom Harkin could be on the air as early as Monday, campaign aides said.

Clinton’s ad immediately sparked an angry response from Kerrey, who was campaigning in New Hampshire. He criticized the ad as “completely misleading,” charging that the governor’s call for a national health care program lacked specifics. Kerrey’s own detailed health care proposal is his campaign’s centerpiece.

Kerrey also blasted Clinton’s overall economic recovery plan as “more revolting than it is revolutionary.”

The opening of the ad wars marks a crucial early moment in the 1992 presidential election. For better or worse, ads force candidates to distill their ideas and messages into tightly focused statements of what their campaigns represent, a feat some candidates have had trouble accomplishing so far. Kerrey, for instance, has been faulted by political observers for failing to effectively articulate his reasons for running.

“What is your campaign about? Some candidates are having trouble arriving at that,” said Michael Shea, a Tsongas consultant. “Now it becomes increasingly difficult. People will say, we’re waiting, we’re waiting.”

Clinton’s ads are the most unusual of the initial batch. They also reflect a campaign that is particularly well coordinated and is endeavoring to depict their man as a new kind of Democrat.

Political candidates typically begin campaigns with biographical ads that seek to explain in heroic terms who they are. But Clinton’s introductory ad has the candidate talking directly into the camera, asking voters to write or call for a copy of his “comprehensive plan to get our economy moving again.”

The ad is also 60 seconds long, a rarity in the age of 30-second spots. More unusual, the ad is coordinated with a direct-mail campaign. Next week, Clinton will mail an eight-page version of his plan to every registered Democrat in the state.

“This is an attempt to cut through the cynicism and alienation,” said Clinton media consultant Frank Greer. “People in New Hampshire are longing to know what you are going to do, more than who you are.”

But some analysts also believe Clinton--a rather subdued and polished professional politician--hopes to create an impression of himself as a candidate of substance because he cannot compete in terms of personal history with such rivals as Kerrey, a Vietnam War hero, or Harkin, the son of a coal miner who died of black lung disease.

The Clinton ad is to run for 10 days on Boston, New Hampshire and Vermont stations. Campaign officials said they have purchased enough television time so that the average viewer can be expected to see some version of the ad five or six times. Subsequent ads, Greer said, will focus on specific elements of Clinton’s plan.

If Kerrey also begins with issue-oriented ads, he and Clinton would both be repeating a technique used by Democrat Harris Wofford in his surprise Senate victory in Pennsylvania in November over former Atty. Gen. Dick Thornburgh. Wofford, a political unknown, campaigned on issues such as health care and did not run a biographical ad until the last two weeks of the campaign.

Kerrey’s aides would not discuss their ads, what they would say or how large an investment they would make.

Tsongas’ ad is more conventional and tries to compensate for what his aides acknowledge is a lack of “star” quality. “His ideas are right, people like him and respect him, he is connecting intellectually,” said Tsongas consultant Shea. The hurdle he must overcome, Shea said, is: “Can they see him as President?”

Accordingly, the ad begins, “He’s no movie star, but Paul Tsongas is something else.”

It was Tsongas, the ad says, “who forced the agreement in Congress” to save Chrysler. The ad also credits Tsongas with pushing through Congress what has been called “the conservation bill of the century,” referring to a 1980 measure that protected 104 million acres of wilderness in Alaska from development.

To document these claims, the Tsongas campaign provided two journalistic sources citing Tsongas as crucial to the Chrysler bailout agreement and a Congressional Quarterly article that said “environmentalists once touted (the Alaska wilderness issue) as the ‘conservation vote of the century.’ ”

Tsongas’ staff declined to say how large a purchase of time they would make, a crucial factor in determining how effective the ads could be.

Judging any ad’s effectiveness is a murky business. But Clinton aides were pleased with the initial reaction to their ad, saying that by mid-afternoon Thursday, 120 people already had called in for copies of the governor’s economic plan.

Times staff writers Karen Tumulty and David Lauter contributed to this story from New Hampshire.