Kluck! Kluck! Kluck!

By Ed Magnuson

The azaleas are in bloom in Metairie, a neatly landscaped New Orleans suburb where conservatives vastly outnumber liberals and the lush estates of the wealthy border the trim wood-and-stucco bungalows of the middle class. But there was a deeper shade of red last week on the faces of national Republican leaders over what the residents of Metairie, who populate Louisiana's 81st legislative district, had wrought. Some 78% of the district's 21,464 registered voters, only 52 of whom are black, had turned out to give a vacant statehouse seat to David Duke, 38, a former grand wizard of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan who recently converted to the G.O.P. As Duke took his oath of office, his followers cheered from the gallery and state Republican legislators accepted him into their caucus.

That such a notorious white supremacist could run and win under the G.O.P. banner was especially embarrassing to Lee Atwater, chairman of the Republican National Committee. Atwater has embarked on a campaign to broaden his party by attracting more blacks. He derided Duke as "a pretender, a charlatan and a political opportunist" who turned Republican shortly before the special election primary on Jan. 21. Duke finished first in a seven-candidate field.

During the runoff campaign against the second-place finisher, Republican home builder John Treen, Atwater sent messages from President Bush and Ronald Reagan urging Duke's defeat. This effort not only failed but apparently backfired. "We resent outsiders coming in trying to influence us," explained Guy Hinton, a third-generation resident of Metairie. Duke, a highly charged campaigner, defeated the stolid Treen by a mere 227 votes.

"I feel more comfortable in the Republican Party," Duke declared, needling his G.O.P. critics. An avowed Nazi in his college years, Duke entered presidential primaries in a few states last year as a Democrat but won no delegates. He ran as presidential candidate of the Populist Party and got only 0.05% of the vote. Although he claims to have left the Klan in 1979, his home address serves as the local Klan office. He now heads the National Association for the Advancement of White People from the same location. While he professes to believe in "civil rights for all people," his new organization publishes an anti-Semitic newspaper (30,000 subscribers) that advocates restricting Jews to ethnic enclaves.

The denunciation of Duke by Bush, Reagan and Atwater had an ironic ring. Ever since the 1960s, strategists have lured white Southerners to the G.O.P. with thinly disguised racial appeals. The Reagan Administration opposed extension of the Voting Rights Act, affirmative-action programs and busing to achieve school integration. In 1986 the Republican National Committee supported the purging of voting lists in Louisiana, ostensibly to eliminate residents who had moved or died but actually, as it conceded in an internal memo, to reduce black turnouts. Only recently, Reagan contended that some black civil rights leaders cling to profitable posts by claiming falsely that blacks are victims of discrimination.

The Bush presidential campaign used Willie Horton, a black who committed a rape while on furlough from a Massachusetts prison, to unfair but great advantage against Michael Dukakis. Said Ron Brown, who took over as chairman of the Democratic National Committee three weeks ago: "It is disingenuous for the people who ran the Willie Horton ads to express shock and dismay over David Duke. The chickens are coming home to roost."

With reporting by Joseph J. Kane/Metairie