Campaign ’96 / CANDIDATES : The Buchanan-Ball Express Barrels Down the Primary Track : Candidate’s entourage copes with a scheduling nightmare as it jets from time zone to time zone, harried reporters in tow.

The Go-Pat-Go Express is like a small business with a hot product: Patrick J. Buchanan may be an electoral success in the Republican presidential race, but his life is suddenly a logistics nightmare.

The first 22 hours after his surprising win in Tuesday’s New Hampshire primary featured four campaign stops in three states in three time zones. Two hours in the air and 10 on land and three in the air and one on land and two in the air and right about now you should be getting the picture of what life is like when your campaign is on fire.

Buchanan’s entourage included a huge contingent of reporters, some of whom found themselves searching for lodging in the predawn hours in South Carolina.

The confusion continued Thursday as the conservative former commentator came to Tucson to join in a rodeo parade there; his campaign scheduled a news conference for one place, several reporters were directed to another. As the horse-drawn carriage carrying Buchanan passed by the waiting journalists, he acknowledged them with a polite wave.

The week after Labor Day, Buchanan hit the road virtually alone: one candidate with one wife and one reporter in one van. Today, his brave new world includes motorcades and state troopers, chartered planes and bomb-sniffing dogs.

His campaign is in an uproar, trying to manage a press horde and battling with the Secret Service agent who showed up for the first time Tuesday night to get the candidate and his traveling road show from one state to another--fast.

Amid all this confusion, the sleep-deprived Buchanan focuses on his real job:

* Rallying the anti-abortion movement in South Carolina, where voters go to the polls in just over a week and where leading conservative Phyllis Schlafly endorsed him Wednesday morning as “the one candidate who can win who we know respects the fundamental individual right to life of the unborn baby.”

* Pushing the message dearest to his heart, the issue that, as he said at a news conference later Wednesday, “is really gnawing at the soul of America. It is the economic insecurity of the American middle class.”

* Whipping up a crowd of 1,000 potential voters who waited two hours in a stuffy Denver ballroom just to see their man in person Wednesday night. They are waving flags, they are shouting “Amen.” All they have to offer is $20 and a vote; enough of them strung together and Buchanan begins to smell a victory. “You know how [President] Clinton tells audiences, ‘I can feel your pain,’ ” Buchanan shouts. “When we get the nomination, we’ll make Clinton feel the pain.”

The Go-Pat-Go Express took off at midnight EST from the Manchester, N.H., airport after a flush-faced Buchanan reveled Tuesday night in his primary victory. Standing in the night chill on the damp tarmac, the laughing candidate attributes the one-percentage-point loss suffered by the onetime front-runner, Bob Dole, to a “bad hair day.” And he outlines his strategy for a whirlwind Wednesday and Thursday on the road.

“We go south to South Carolina because that [primary] is 10 days from now,” he says. “Then we strike north to the Dakotas because [the primaries there on Tuesday] are proportional. If you get a threshold [of the vote] we can get delegates. Then we go into Colorado. Thursday we go to Arizona. We’ve got a debate Thursday night with Bob Dole. We certainly look forward to seeing him in that debate.”

(As it turned out, Dole ignored the pleading of his Arizona backers to attend the forum and instead spent his campaign day in Colorado.)

At 30,000 feet, en route to Columbia, S.C., campaign treasurer Scott Mackenzie exults over the slim New Hampshire win and its expected effect on an operation that boasts of being lean and mean.

In the week between the Iowa caucuses (in which Buchanan finished a strong second behind Dole) and the New Hampshire primary, he says, “we raised $700,000. Usually, we’ve been raising $350,000 to $400,000 a week. We’re expecting a pretty big spike now that New Hampshire is behind us. . . . The money is definitely picking up.”

Starting at 6:30 a.m. EST Wednesday, Buchanan answered questions on all the TV network morning shows. Then he taped a new commercial designed for the Arizona market--touting English-only laws and the evils of illegal immigration--and headed off to an 8 a.m. rally that actually started about 40 minutes later than that.

All this came on just three hours of sleep, for Buchanan’s chartered plane did not touch down in Columbia until 2 a.m. The press corps that arrived with the candidate got half that much shut-eye, at best.

In a new-kid-on-the-block blunder, the Buchanan campaign assured reporters that it had reserved 35 rooms for them at the Ramada Hotel in Columbia. The bus arrived in the 3 a.m. fog, the bedraggled reporters filed in five minutes later and the desk clerk greeted them: “Are you sure you’ve got the right Ramada?”

Half of the group eventually bunked there, the rest high-tailed it across Two Notch Road to double up at the Fairfield Inn, Marriott’s answer to Motel 6. At 4 a.m. bags had not arrived. At 5 a.m. the bus departed for those reporters who simply had to sit in on Buchanan’s first Wednesday morning words.

As the campaign day progresses, the press corps is reduced in appearance to a ragtag crew. Not so the candidate. Indeed, a mystery enfolds--how can anyone stay looking so crisp--white shirt bright, black wingtips shined--when zigzagging across the country at breakneck speed?

“By the time this is over, my suit will be standing up by itself,” says Secret Service Agent Gerry Carlson, 24 hours into a 21-day stint shepherding the head of the Buchanan Brigade.

Logistics problems continue to plague the campaign when it comes time to depart South Carolina for South Dakota. The original plan was to leave at around 9:30 a.m. EST Wednesday, after landing at 2 a.m. But late Tuesday night--no, Wednesday morning--the campaign found out that the Federal Aviation Administration requires flight crews to be on the ground for nine hours and 15 minutes.

The plane finally takes off at noon and lands in Sioux Falls, S.D., three hours later, where the man of the hour is greeted by an enthusiastic rally at Joe Foss Field.

An Ash Wednesday-smudged priest wanders through the crowd, the Sioux Falls Christian High School band plays “My Country ‘Tis Of Thee” and the “Liberty Bell March,” and Buchanan declares, “This campaign is on fire.”

Two hours later comes the perfect Kodak moment in the beautiful Black Hills. There he is, the proud protectionist, with a U.S. flag waving at his right, 500 sign-waving supporters before him and Mt. Rushmore at his back.

His speech over, Buchanan leaves the podium. Flashing a final thumbs-up at the visages of Lincoln, Washington, Jefferson and Theodore Roosevelt, he turns and faces a thicket of cameras. A grin. “Great shot, huh?”

But the pitfalls awaiting a careening campaign are many, and the photos from part of Thursday’s stumping are not likely to find a way into Buchanan’s scrapbook.

With another predawn departure--this one from Denver--Buchanan arrives in Tucson about 9 a.m. and immediately heads to a Latino neighborhood for a ride in the city’s 71st annual rodeo parade, an event that bills itself as the nation’s oldest non-mechanized parade.

Police estimate the celebration has drawn at least 200,000 people, packed onto sidewalks at least three deep and stretching for more than a mile. But the crowd includes a vocal pocket of protesters. They chant slogans, including “Deport Buchanan,” and wave signs like one that reads: “Mr. Buchanan, Arizona is proud of its diversity.”

Buchanan, dressed for the occasion in an embroidered blue western shirt and a black cowboy hat, does not react. His parade, after, all, has barely begun.

Times staff writer Dave Lesher in Tucson contributed to this story.