Tsongas Goes Along With Image Game : Politics: Old-shoe and plain-speaking? Or clever and calculating? His behavior often seems to blend artifice, sincerity.

NASHVILLE —  Standing on the Tarmac at the foot of his campaign plane, Paul E. Tsongas sent the football arcing skyward and tumbling to a graceful reception in the arms of his campaign press secretary.

The pass wasn’t gracefully received by a Nashville television reporter standing on the sidelines. “I can’t believe he’s doing this,” she said, wrinkling her nose. “It’s so . . . corny!”

Presidential candidates from Massachusetts have been showing off their touch-football skills for a long time to show their kinship with vigorous, red-blooded Americans. But when this former senator does it, he has a problem.

Is he, in fact, the plain-speaking, old-shoe, unblow-dried non-politician from the pre-television era, as he has claimed? Or is he, as Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton put it last Saturday, only another “very clever, calculating politician?”

Tsongas tries to pull off his image-making with a wink, a shrug and a candid sigh that says, yes, I do it, because that’s what campaigning requires. It is an approach that makes his behavior often seem an odd blend of artifice and sincerity.

Campaigning in New Hampshire, Tsongas contracted an eye infection and decided to wear a pair of square-rimmed eyeglasses to a debate, in an effort to conceal his bloodshot eyes. Later, he joked in a tone suggesting it was all silliness that he had spent “three or four hours” trying on glasses frames. (He ended up with a pair he already owned.)

To formal campaign appearances, he invariably wears red diagonally striped ties--then jokes about how his media consultant told him it was de rigueur for presidential candidates.

One of the routine photo opportunities of his campaign is the poolside appearance where the 51-year-old Tsongas appears in his skimpy Speed-O style swimsuit and goggles to demonstrate his mastery of the butterfly stroke.

As he goes through these paces, he explains that he has to do it to persuade voters he is vigorous despite his bout with the cancer called lymphoma he contracted eight years ago. “You don’t know what embarrassment is until you’ve had to get photographed in your swimming suit,” Tsongas says.

Tsongas has been treated well in the press for coming across as a glamorless homebody. Perhaps to reinforce this, he wears a single dark blue cotton button-down shirt day after day on the campaign trail, and switches to dark suits for formal appearances. He wears a pair of worn navy blue slacks with the kind of thick belt that was last stylish in the mid-1970s.

His apparent devotion to his shirt has prompted questions about how the candidate, whose family ran a cleaners in Lowell, Mass., keeps the shirt clean. “What makes you think it’s clean?” Tsongas deadpans.

Ed Jesser, Tsongas’ wise-cracking communications director, has accused his candidate of keeping an entire wardrobe of the same shirt on the campaign plane.

The candidate, who doesn’t smoke and drinks only on ceremonial occasions, seems lately to have been trying to modify his image as a man who, somewhat prissily, avoids profanity. After one campaign stop last week, Tsongas went on the aircraft’s public address system to say, in his familiar, tremulous tone: “This is your captain. If you would all get your asses back to your seats, we can take off.”

He has called Clinton a “pander bear” for trying to win votes, and denounced the Arkansan as “cynical and unprincipled.” Tsongas has tried to insist that he, more than anyone, wants peace. He has been forced to assault Clinton, he insists, to show Clinton, and the foreign leaders he may someday face, that “this is a Greek from Massachusetts who fights back.”

Clearly, this argument has not been persuasive to all voters. At a rally sponsored by an anti-poverty group in Miami’s Overtown section on Saturday, David Davis, a Miami bail bondsman, said he considered the attacks the usual politics. “They all do it about the same,” he said.

But if some of the candidate’s behavior is calculated, at other times it seems sincere.

Tsongas was deeply upset when a Palm Beach County motorcycle policeman was killed in a traffic accident last Friday night while escorting Tsongas’ motorcade to Ft. Lauderdale.

The next morning, Tsongas appeared at a hotel meeting room to read a statement expressing his sorrow. But when he reached the dais, his eyes filled with tears. He rushed out of the room with no explanation, and needed several minutes to regain his composure.