Bush Goes Low-Key as Buchanan Falters : Republicans: President is relaxed on Chicago stops. Challenger gets heckled by Michigan auto workers.

The Bush and Buchanan presidential campaigns presented stark contrasts Monday, as the President made a relaxed trip here while Patrick J. Buchanan did not try to hide the fact that his effort in Michigan and Illinois is running in circles.

On a day in which he made four speeches--two at fund-raising events, one at a factory in Milwaukee and another at the headquarters of the Polish National Alliance--Bush seemed unfazed by opponents in his own party or on the Democratic side. The Bush fund-raisers raised $1.4 million.

The primary elections, Bush said, “seem to be getting better and better.”

Meanwhile, Buchanan spun through Michigan, seeking but missing an opportunity to use a General Motors facility as a backdrop for his campaign message of American industrial decline.

Auto workers, angry over the impending closure of their plant and the loss of their jobs, wanted no part of the candidate and left a locked-out Buchanan standing in the middle of a police-clogged highway begging heckling auto workers to “come out and talk to me.”

The embarrassing scene served as a metaphor for much of Buchanan’s six-day Midwestern swing, in which the campaign often seemed to be groping for organization and chasing the wrong audiences.

“You know we spent an awful lot of time on the bus and in cars,” to little effect, Buchanan told reporters.

For his part, Bush reflected a new low-key approach in which he nearly ignores his opponents, hits the road less frequently and focuses more on his presidential duties. At the heart of the shift is the belief that the challenge posed by Buchanan is fading and it is time to focus on November.

He reminded the Polish-American community here of several previous visits with them and announced that “the 1,000th cargo container of American humanitarian supplies was just sent on its way to Poland.”

The crowd interrupted Bush several times with applause, particularly when he declared--in a direct slap at Buchanan’s “America first” campaign--”I am not going to pull back into some Fortress America.”

Bush spent the morning in Milwaukee visiting a minority-owned steel company that hires workers from inner-city neighborhoods. The plant, Steeltech Manufacturing Inc., supplies flat-bed pallets for military trucks, one of which provided a muscular, Army-green background for his brief speech on the factory floor.

The company’s 75 non-union workers gave him a polite but restrained welcome, but one worker said for every relative who has a job, 10 are out of work, and it will take more than a presidential visit to gain his vote in November.

“I’m trying very hard to fight for a better economic climate, not just for people here but all across our country,” Bush said. The Wisconsin primary is three weeks away.

At a fund-raising luncheon for the Bush campaign in Milwaukee, there was a fresh signal that within the President’s camp, political attention is shifting away from Buchanan and toward the general election campaign. When Wisconsin’s Republican governor, Tommy G. Thompson, introduced the President, he made a direct, if only passing, reference to Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton, the leading Democratic presidential candidate. “You look at a state like Arkansas, at the bottom of the rung as far as education” is concerned, Thompson said.

Bush is making his first visit to Arkansas as President today. It is the only state he has not visited since taking office.

He is flying to Fayetteville and then driving to Bentonville, headquarters of the Wal-Mart discount store chain, to award the Medal of Freedom to the chain’s founder, Sam Walton, one of the wealthiest men in the nation.

Buchanan had high hopes for the Illinois and Michigan primaries, especially after energetic audiences of Eastern European immigrants welcomed him with money and noisy rallies in Chicago on Thursday.

But any momentum from those receptions ended as soon as the campaign moved into Michigan, where staffers had suggested angry auto workers would be likely to cross party lines to support Buchanan’s message of U.S. industrial protectionism.

Such shows of support never appeared.

“I would have been happy to meet with a lot more groups,” Buchanan told reporters Monday. “If we had rescheduled Michigan, I might have scheduled it differently.”

The campaign, for example, failed to schedule any events in white ethnic neighborhoods in the Detroit area and never organized a gathering of so-called Reagan Democrats, who might have been persuaded to cross party lines in the state’s open primary.

Instead, Buchanan spent nearly three days in Bay City and Midland, two relatively small towns in the state’s Tri-Cities area, where he spoke to college students, attended two fundamentalist churches and marched in a sparsely attended St. Patrick’s Day parade.

“I think (the campaign) probably should have spent more time on radio and television and more time in vote-rich areas, more time with the Reagan Democrats,” Buchanan said, noting he would have liked to have made an appeal in Macomb County, a blue-collar area of suburban Detroit. “I think, for instance, that’s a very vote-rich area.

“And, to be honest, I’ve (attended) an awful lot of student affairs where you get real enthusiasm and energy, but you wonder whether those are where the votes are,” the candidate said ruefully.

Late Monday, Buchanan held a rally in Macomb County but was greeted by Jewish protesters. One held a sign that said: “Pat=Duke without the sheet.” Campaign officials said the protesters appeared to be with a group called Coalition for Jewish Concerns, which has dogged the Buchanan campaign.