As Witching Hour Nears, Buchanan Tries to Exit the Dance Politely : Candidate: Former belle of the protest voters wages a primary campaign he knows he can’t win. His total return to GOP fold remains uncertain.

As he cruises along California freeways emptied just for him, Patrick J. Buchanan is well aware that it is a matter of days before his coach turns back into a pumpkin.

He was the belle of a protest-vote ball, but now Ross Perot is the Cinderella on whom all eyes are fixed. The police escort that speeds alongside still gives Buchanan’s Republican presidential campaign a last aura of grandeur. But 25 weeks after his transformation to White House hopeful, the conservative commentator understands that midnight is near.

He had threatened to make the California primary a fierce fight to make President Bush hew to the conservative creed; instead he has taken pains to keep it polite. He praises Vice President Dan Quayle in terms stunning to ears who for weeks heard him scorn “little Danny.” And when talk-radio interviews turn to Perot, Buchanan good-naturedly reverts to the role of the pundit.

“He’s got the darndest coalition I’ve ever seen,” Buchanan marveled the other day when asked about the Texas tycoon’s anticipated presidential campaign. “He’s got Brown voters, Buchanan voters. It’s like a painting by Jackson Pollock.”

For Pat Buchanan, always known as an angry man, the race for the White House has proven a vindication. But even as he now pledges to act the part of a loyal Republican, he still seems bound to the outraged.

“What is the story of 1992? It is the great American protest vote,” he said this week. “What is going to be the name on the paternity suit? I think it’s going to be me.”

So much has attention shifted to the general election that Buchanan, without a victory to his name, sometimes seems apologetic still to be waging a primary election race. Secret Service agents and staff sometimes outnumber supporters at campaign events, and he recognizes (“Only six more days,” he told one group this week) that his presence is jarring.

In compensation, Buchanan assures nearly every audience that he intends to endorse Bush at August’s GOP convention. But it remains unclear how total will be his return to the party fold--and whether those voters who saw him as a symbol of protest can be persuaded now to throw their support to Bush.

“It’s a hard thing to say you’ve got to come back and support Mr. Bush because I don’t know what Mr. Perot stands for right now,” Buchanan conceded at a La Jolla Republican luncheon the other day. “All I can tell you is what I’m going to do, and I’m going to support the nominee of our party.”

Already Buchanan organizers report wholesale defections to Perot, not only among voters but campaign professionals. In the conservative stronghold of Orange County, Buchanan volunteers fearful of a Perot write-in blitz in the primary have circulated flyers urging supporters to stand by their man, at least through Tuesday.

As Buchanan looks back upon the Texan who has taken his place on the stage, he seems at once bitter, mischievous and awe-struck. Having been jilted himself, he predicts that the “tidal wave” on which Perot is riding will ultimately leave the independent, too, beached and battered.

But in the next breath, he is dispensing free advice to Perot to “stay away from press conferences and all of that . . . because when you start defining yourself, you start losing people.”

And if his sense of obligation lies with Bush, he takes dark pleasure in camaraderie with the underdog. He recently told an Orange County gathering: “This Perot thing is something. People are so desperate and angry at Washington, he may be able to do it if he plays it right.”

That the 53-year-old Buchanan is still on the presidential trail is itself remarkable, given that his standing has dropped steadily since he collected a stunning 37% of the vote in February’s New Hampshire primary.

Now the chartered jet that carried him through the early primaries has given way to commercial flights and a six-car caravan. But on the road he remains, urging California voters to at least give him enough support to “keep sending Mr. Bush the message that’s been shaking him up all year long.”

In some ways, the California campaign has become a victory lap. Again and again, Buchanan boasts of small treasures won: a recanting from Bush on the 1990 tax increase he had pledged not to allow; the dismissal of the head of the National Endowment for the Arts. The challenger also says he is confident that he will be invited to speak at the Houston convention unless the Bush team is “utterly foolish.”

If he never could get the best of Bush and his camp, he told volunteers gathered at his headquarters in Glendale, “We’ve certainly put a blowtorch to their backsides.”

Buchanan has not abandoned his crusade for further concessions. On the theory that the White House “responds to votes,” he has sought to make Tuesday’s vote a referendum on immigration policy that he says in radio advertisements has permitted “an illegal invasion of this country.”

But no more than a few dozen onlookers turned out for a Buchanan event outside the San Diego County jail at which he sought to call attention to crimes committed by illegal residents. He condemned those he says cross the border “to prey upon citizens of the United States,” and was joined by the mother of a 16-year-old Santee youth killed by a drunk driver who was in the country illegally.

Yet Buchanan could only smile when asked if he could offer a scenario in which he still might capture the GOP nomination. “Mr. Bush gets the message and decides to stand down and there’s an open convention,” he said. “That’s the most plausible scenario and it’s not very plausible.”

Even as he demonstrates good cheer, though, he remains quick to assume his role as a political provocateur. He told a Los Angeles talk-radio host he would have joined Korean-Americans in shooting at looters had he been caught in the midst of the city’s riots.

More broadly, Buchanan suggests that the nation should consider imposing a “pause” on legal immigration--and hints that he might carry that banner in the 1996 presidential race.

“I’ve got four years to figure out how to dispose of my Mercedes,” he said of the foreign-made car his wife drives that helped to derail his “America first” message.

But Buchanan’s attention remains most closely fixed on the expected three-way general election race that seems as baffling to him as it is to most everyone else.

He has begun to try out his role as a Republican attack-dog--blasting presumptive Democratic nominee Bill Clinton as a candidate “carrying more baggage than Napoleon’s army.” But he seems unable to resist criticism of the Bush team he has pledged to support.

Until he remembers to reconsider, he likens Bush aides Richard G. Darman and Nicholas F. Brady to the author and doctor who have counseled some to commit suicide, calling the Cabinet members “the Derek Humphry and Dr. Kevorkian of the American economy.”

In an interview, he expressed no regret that his candidacy “revealed the depth of the dissatisfaction with Bush, and probably expanded it and deepened it.”

In a visit to his Los Angeles headquarters, the effect of six months of such slashing attacks is plain. Outside the Glendale office recently, Brodie Broderson was wearing a reversible straw-boater hat that bears both Buchanan and Perot banners. He persuaded dozens of Buchanan supporters to sign a petition that would put Perot on the California ballot.

Inside, Buchanan was taken aback as he tried to sound a gracious final note. To his promise to support Bush, Pasadena resident Suzanne Hanrahan loudly interrupted: “Why?’

Buchanan looked stunned, and then began to laugh. He has been asking himself that question for more than six months, and he has a hard time mustering a response. “Because I gave my word,” he said.