David Duke's Addictive Politics

By GARRY WILLS

Tailgate parties before L.S.U. football games are an all-day affair in Baton Rouge. Vendors set up, even for a night game, during the morning. By noon the vans are rolling in from all over the state to raise their family marquees. The vans, trucks and station wagons are traveling statements. One has a horn that bugles "Glory, glory, hallelujah" as it enters the parking area. Some are equipped with public-address systems through which the owners issue cheers, personal manifestos and invitations to join them for a drink. On the platform atop one large van, Confederate flags flying from its railing, is a Dixieland band. When a David Duke truck pulls into the lot, the men in the band intone "white power" into their mikes. David Duke, running for the U.S. Senate, has come home.

On opening day of the season (the Louisiana State-Georgia game), Duke strikes out into the jumble of vans and says facetiously, "We might even meet some opposition out here!" A woman at one van, standing next to a scribbling reporter, shouts, "We love you, David, and to hell with the media." (In the best Southern tradition of jocular animosity, she hugs me while she says it.) Young people along his route take up and pass along his barked accolade: "Duke!" "Duke!" "Duke!" "Duke!"

An aide asks, "Have you even seen a grass-roots campaign like this?" I say, Yes, I covered George Wallace in 1968 and 1972. Yet the dynamics are as different here as is the candidate. The early Wallace was a colorful Southern racist, at one with his followers' ancient prejudices. Duke is a smooth outsider, an intellectual of an alien ideology who has tempered his appeal to fit people's anxieties.

"He looks better than on TV," one woman tells another with approval. In real life he looks better than real. Cosmetic surgeons, employed in relays, have made him larger of chin, lesser of nose and chemically scrubbed of wrinkles, as if to erase an embarrassing past from his face as well as his record. Only rays of "laugh lines" going out from the side of his eyes are unnaturally deep, like a high school actor's heavy pencilings for an older part.

Duke looks too young, at 40, to have founded so many racist organizations and journals and to have run for so many offices -- twice for the state senate (as a Klan member), twice for the presidency (as a Democrat and then as a Populist), once for the vice presidency (in New Hampshire), once for the state legislature (as a Republican) and now for the Senate (as a Republican without the party's endorsement). Even as a Klan member, he won 33% of the vote in his 1975 Senate race. As an overnight Republican, he won 51% in his runoff victory for the statehouse seat he holds. The latest polls show him with 25% going into the Oct. 6 primary against incumbent J. Bennett Johnston's 42%, but Duke claims he has a secret vote from people who will not confess their preference to pollsters. This was the case in his 1989 victory, and pollster Susan Howell says Duke "flies below radar." But as he becomes more acceptable, more familiar on the scene, more identified with nonracist politics (like his defeat of Governor Buddy Roemer's tax increase), there is less reason for voters to hide their support of him.

Even Georgia fans are accepting Duke's stickers and labels, as he tactfully claims: "It will be all right, whether Georgia or L.S.U. wins -- we're all Southerners." But he does not sound like a Southerner. When he entered grade school in New Orleans, he was teased for having a Dutch accent. (His engineer father had taken the family to the Netherlands in the 1950s.) A bookish loner in school, Duke sought out extremist mentors who treated him as a brilliant young disciple. With contemporaries he was condescending or defiant, moving to a deeper rhythm of history than they could be aware of, trying to shock them into submission with "street theater" involving swastikas and Klan robes.

He jokes now about his youthful "indiscretions," presenting them as typical of the 1960s. Tom Hayden, he likes to say, was tried for inciting to riot before he entered a state legislature. He claims without proof that the late U.S. Congressman Mickey Leland was a Black Panther. Those people were associated with violence, whereas "my branch of the Klan was nonviolent."

A woman at the L.S.U. game presses close to say "I'm for you, but my sister says she will never vote for a man who hates Catholics." He answers, with a smile, "When I was in the Klan, most of my members were Catholics" (as are most of the residents in his current district).

A dentist from Lafayette describes the support for Duke at a hospital where he works. He thinks it is dirty campaigning for Duke's foes to keep bringing up his past: "The Times-Picayune does not bring up Chappaquiddick every time it mentions Teddy Kennedy." "They bring up my past," Duke tells the dentist, "because they do not want to talk about my issues." His issues -- he owns them around here -- are opposition to affirmative action, minority set-asides and welfare without drug testing. "I'm for equal rights, even for white people" is the briefest statement of his program -- and one that usually elicits rebel yells.

As he moves among the L.S.U. students, they talk as if oppressed by blacks "who are getting everything." One says, "Yeah, think of the Nike thing" -- Operation PUSH's boycott of the sportswear company, demanding it hire / blacks at the management level. "That's just extortion."

The people who are "getting everything" are nowhere to be seen among the picnickers. The only blacks visible wear the Day-Glo blazers of parking attendants. In fact, the prosperity of Duke's supporters is a point of pride to the campaign aide who asks me, "Do these people look like piney-woods rednecks?"

For this audience, the welfare chiseler is an icon of moral theft rather than a real challenge to the pocketbook. (Welfare in Louisiana is stingy; aid for dependent children takes only 2% of the state budget.) Duke's people are affronted by the thought that large bodies of blacks are getting something for nothing, or actually being rewarded for irresponsibility (or crime). Ronald Reagan got great mileage from a mythical "welfare queen." Duke has a true story he tells to even greater effect, developing it to apocalyptic dimensions. He gave me one of its shorter versions:

"The first baby born in New Orleans last year was the eighth child of a woman on welfare -- all eight born in the hospital at taxpayers' expense. In Louisiana it costs about $4,000 a year to educate a child in public school. Eight times four is about $30,000 a year. In ten years that is $300,000 -- in education costs alone, and you haven't talked about welfare payments, food stamps, housing; you haven't talked about police and fire protection; you haven't talked about courts and corrections. It is estimated by most sources that every child born to the welfare system costs well over $100,000, and that's if the child doesn't get into serious criminal activity. So that one woman's welfare family could cost taxpayers over a million dollars. The cycle continues. In this country it costs between $16,000 and $25,000 a year to incarcerate someone in prison. Add the rising insurance costs to business, the human costs of people being slaughtered in our streets and stores and byways."

This peril to the West can be developed until the crowd swirling around the L.S.U. stadium feels that bastion of civilization is rocking on its base -- all from the output of one woman's womb.

In deftly adding education costs to his accounting of society's loss to blacks -- though these costs cover all children, rich or poor, white or black, who attend public schools -- Duke is expressing a resentment of the poor for daring to exist. During his more forthright racist days, he had eugenic solutions for the problem: tax deterrents to breeding by the lower class matched by incentives for the genetically superior. He has softened that to drug testing and mandatory instruction in contraception for all welfare recipients.

Duke presents his campaign as a call for courage. Speaking a few days before the L.S.U. game, he told a Cajun crowd in Reserve, La., "What I say is just what you say to each other around the dining room table; but I'm the only politician who has the courage to say it in public." There is a rogue air of risk to his enterprise. Only those willing to risk obloquy will put his bumper stickers on their car, post his signs in their yard -- and so each such display becomes a kind of guerrilla statement. He revels in being attacked by "respectable" people. "The President of the U.S. attacked me ((when he ran for the state legislature)). The ex-President attacked me. The state party attacked me, the national party. The only one who didn't attack me was the Ayatullah Khomeini, and that was only because he was ill at the time." The Cajun men in undershirts cluster around Duke as he moves across a duskily lit softball field, praising his courage. "No one else will speak out," one of them says.

Some see in this a pattern of demagogy of the sort Louisiana has specialized in from Huey Long's time to that of Edwin Edwards. But Huey Long did not claim, as Duke does, to be a serious author writing on the environment and other subjects -- even, once, a sex manual -- under various pseudonyms. Ben C. Toledano, one of the founders of modern Republicanism in Louisiana, sees nothing of Huey in Duke. "My family has lived in New Orleans for 265 years -- a long time for Americans, and I don't see anything Southern in Duke. You drop him in Iowa, or anywhere, and he would get the same response."

Lance Hill agrees. He is the director of the Louisiana Coalition Against Racism and Nazism, founded to oppose Duke. "His appeal can be reproduced wherever a white middle class is close to a black high-crime area. Duke practices what I think of as cocaine politics. Like cocaine, his appeal is easily transported, easily concealed and highly addictive." There are rumblings around the nation that show the spread has already begun. Though Lee Atwater was quick to dissociate the national party from Duke, many Republicans feel that opposition to affirmative action and set-asides is a stand too rewarding to be renounced.

Duke is right, in some measure, about his opponents' unwillingness to talk - about "his issues." Liberals have been rather cowardly about defending affirmative action. They allow caricatures of it to be attacked with impunity (even by blacks like Shelby Steele, a San Jose State University English professor) as a program for quotas, or for rewarding the unqualified rather than finding the qualified. A combination of conservative opportunism and liberal faintheartedness creates soft areas for Duke to exploit.

No matter how he does in this race, his growing acceptability opens up many opportunities for him in 1991, when he can pick his target in a state where the open primary seems made for this kind of permanent campaigning. He can run for Governor, state senator, or the U.S. House. He has struck a vein of rich ore, and others are circling closer to share in mining it.