Campaign ’96 / REPUBLICANS : Returning Fire at Buchanan : Friendly press relations or no, staring down gun barrel deserves a response.

TOMBSTONE, Ariz. —  Staring down the steel shafts of a double-barrel shotgun is not the way I prefer to start my day. And with Patrick J. Buchanan on the trigger end, any self-respecting member of the liberal media elite might feel a tad edgy.

Inside a crowded display tent at a Phoenix gun show the other morning, Buchanan and I ended up on opposite sides of a table piled from edge to edge with enough vintage firepower to launch a Caribbean revolution. Trussed on top of goat and mountain lion skins were rows of Winchesters, Remingtons and antique Sako hunting rifles--and a walnut-stock Charles Daly shotgun that Buchanan, the gun-fancier’s friend, decided to check out.

As photographers snapped away, the candidate in black hat snapped the Daly’s barrel down, cocked it back up and aimed right between my eyes.

He cackled a coldblooded laugh, then handed the gun to his wife, Shelly. She was no more pitying, aiming again at my head.

“Don’t point that at the Los Angeles Times,” Buchanan said, roaring with anti-press laughter.

Small favors.

To his adoring crowds and to ideologues who watched from a distance, Buchanan and the highway-weary corps of reporters, photographers, video-jockeys and anchor people following him might be expected to be locked in some psychological game of chicken, a war of nerves that would likely end with one of us cold-cocking him with a mike boom or Buchanan encouraging his hordes to come after our scalps.

But the ugly little secret of the Buchanan campaign is that he is one of us. He’s a former St. Louis Globe-Democrat editorial writer who basks in the attention of the press, a secret fellow hack who bares his ink-stained-wretch blots with pride.

The road warriors on his campaign staff coddle us with small kindnesses rarely bestowed by Buchanan’s competition in the Republican presidential race. Buchanan seems to give press availabilities every 10 minutes, so eager to gab that he literally thinks out loud in front of us, forming campaign strategy by the moment, cracking jokes about his rivals, endlessly altering stale old sound bites so they sound fresh for the talking heads on the nightly news.

There are serious issues at stake whenever he opens his mouth: the shifting nature of his populist revolution, a crude power that his provocative language works on his angry supporters, the fundamental quarrels between him and the Republican Party leadership.

Still, the banter between Buchanan, his aides and the daily-growing press caravan has created a shared vein of black humor and grudging respect rarely in evidence around the other Republican campaigns.

Photographers wander through the press bus yelling, “Lock and load!” Reporters mutter darkly about being drawn and quartered by Buchanan’s shock troops. Buchanan chortled Monday about “burying Beltway Bob” Dole on Boot Hill after preening at the OK Corral in a black Western duster while he fingered an antique Colt six-shooter.

After the candidate in black ducked into a corral shed to slip out of his dude’s duds, I reminded him in mock protest that he had placed me “in the cross-fire,” as he often threatens to do with Bill Clinton.

Buchanan, as ever, was unrepentant about his and his wife’s aim. “It was the temptation of the devil,” he said, “that we resisted.”

But for a tough talker who wants his primary electorate to believe that he puts America first, he has a wee problem. That vintage shotgun he poked in my direction--it was made in Japan.

Aim at us, boy--as Pat would say--and, well, we shoot back.