So the DPIs are looking for someone to winnow in-even though filing deadlines have passed for all but a handful of state primaries (page 25). One potential winnowee is House Majority Leader Richard Gephardt. Last weekend, NEWSWEEK has learned, Gephardt made a quick trip to California to meet with big-time fund raisers, and he is in daily contact with his 1988 campaign manager, Bill Carrick, who now lives in California. According to CNN, a bill drafted in Missouri, but not yet introduced, would allow Gephardt to remain on the state ballot for the U.S. House and run for another office as well.

But the more visibly available noncandidate candidate is Cuomo. Two months ago the governor of New York said “no,” the party said “goodbye” and Clinton took off. But Clinton’s “character” problems and Tsongas’s surge scrambled the dynamics of the Democratic race. The tumult gave Cuomo another chance and raised the specter-much feared by George Bush’s handlers-of a late entrance in the race that would leave Republicans with little time to derail him.

So when Cuomo put himself on display last week at Harvard-just six days and 30 miles from New Hampshire-the DPIs came to watch. Cuomo performed a series of arias defending traditional Democratic programs, and allowed as how folks in California and Florida (not just New Hampshire) were saying nice things about him. Nothing wrong, he said, with indulging “a little bit of the Don Quixote in your soul.”

Or the Machiavelli. Some shrewd Cuomo watchers, who never thought he’d run, now believe he actually has an idiosyncratic, utterly Cuomo-esque plan, which amounts to letting the tide of events slowly drag him into the White House. It began with a “write-in” effort for him in New Hampshire. Cuomo encouraged voters to write in his name on their ballots, even as he kept his organizational hands off. But after Cuomo met last week with his good friend Boston Mayor Ray Flynn, dozens of Flynn lieutenants materialized in New Hampshire to help out. The Chicago-based politicos who ran the well-financed New Hampshire campaign will now return to Illinois, where an “uncommitted” slate of Cuomo crypto-delegates is on the March 17 ballot.

Stage 2 depends on a couple of contingencies that must go Cuomo’s way. One is that none of the declared candidates builds unstoppable momentum. (Cuomo, by the way, repeatedly referred to them at Harvard as “the other candidates.”) The other variable is that Cuomo must reach agreement with New York State Republicans on a new austerity budget. If both things happen by mid-March, Cuomo can officially enter three late primaries-California, Alabama and New Jersey. In them he would try to demonstrate coast-to-coast appeal as a prelude to a New York convention in which no contestant had control and Cuomo was playing on his home court. As usual, Cuomo wants to have it both ways. He wants to run, but with minimum risk. He wants to be free to move right or left. Like Tsongas, Cuomo has built probusiness credentials, proposing targeted capital-gains-tax cuts and R&D credits, warring with unions and conferring with industrial revivalist Felix Rohatyn. Like Clinton, Cuomo can tout an imaginative list of self-help programs for the poor. But at Harvard he dribbled to his left, where the open floor is, at the moment. He argued passionately that welfare needs reforming less than it needs more money from the federal government. It is a notion Jesse Jackson would applaud. The 700 Harvard students in the audience did-and gave a rousing send-off for Cuomo’s tentative, noncampaign campaign.

Photo: The noncandidate candidate: The New York govenor delivers a speech at Harvard (ROBERT MAASS-SIPA)

“What does my heart tell me? Take your best shot whether you win, lose or draw.”

“There’s no decision. Just another day of shilly-shallying.”

“It seems to me I cannot turn my attention to New Hampshire.”

“In my own state, they’re saying lousy things about me. If they want to say nice things about me in New Hampshire, I’m going to encourage them.