Elections: The Duke of Louisiana

By MICHAEL RILEY/METAIRIE

Strychnine or arsenic, Louisiana? Pick your poison. That's about the only way to look at the state's gubernatorial race, which took on a noxious taint last week when former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke began battling roguish ex-Governor Edwin Edwards for the keys to the executive mansion. The campaign threatens to bare the cantankerous soul of a state that is often derided as America's banana republic, a Third World realm of corrupt and crazy politicians, wild parties and bizarre customs. Yet even Louisiana has never seen anything this weird. Says John Maginnis, publisher of the Louisiana Political Review: "We're in a new dimension of time and space. We're in the twilight zone." Sadly, this excursion may well cost the state its future.

The "race from hell," as Maginnis calls it, is opening old wounds of race and class in a possible preview of next year's ugly national politics. Duke, 41, is tapping into working-class frustrations about welfare and affirmative action, violent crime and failing schools, lost jobs and a stagnant economy that resonate broadly throughout the country. His rise is anathema to the national Republican leadership, which strongly repudiates him but now finds many of its most effective themes tainted by the ex-Klansman's use of them. In the 1992 presidential campaign, George Bush may find it dangerous to blast affirmative action and racial quotas -- much less run Willie Horton-style ads -- now that Duke has catapulted to national prominence under a Republican banner.

Duke's opponent, three-time Democratic Governor Edwards, 64, is fighting to capture the post he lost four years ago after being indicted in a racketeering imbroglio. But no matter who wins, the whole state stands to lose. "It's clear that people are not looking forward to the next 10 years," says New Orleans pollster Edward Renwick. "They're looking to the past. But it's a past that no longer exists."

The fellow to blame for this predicament is incumbent Buddy Roemer, a reform-minded technocrat who fancied himself a crusader for good government but ultimately fell on his own sword. Though a man of ample charm, Roemer managed to alienate voters with a haughty Harvard-bred hubris and a stubborn sense that only he knew what was best for the state. His sweeping reform policies, like restructuring the tax system and overhauling education, may have been Louisiana's castor oil, but voters refused to swallow it. That leaves them with a choice between Duke, who is currently a state representative, and Edwards, a high-stakes gambler with Gucci tastes, a greased-lightning wit and a reputation for skirt chasing. Bewailing the dilemma facing Louisiana voters the day after the Oct. 19 primary -- in which Edwards got 34% of the vote, Duke 32% and Roemer 27% -- the New Orleans Times- Picayune editorialized, "Of all the excesses that have made our state notorious, yesterday's will go into the history books. File it under S for shame."

Whatever else could be said about the primary results, one thing was clear: Duke is for real. Elected to the state house of representatives in early 1989, he grabbed a surprisingly strong 44% of the vote in a failed bid for the U.S. Senate last year. Now political observers are speculating about Duke's presidential aspirations and comparing him to George Wallace, who transformed voter anger into a national populist movement two decades ago. Duke denies he has plans to run for the White House, but he warns that next year his "issues are coming to the forefront. I'll have an impact, certainly."

Visitors to the state may feel they have stepped into a foreign country, a land of Mardi Gras, Cajun cooking and the Catahoula hound. The flags of six - countries have flown over this state, where the Napoleonic Code still prevails and French is often the first language in the southwestern Cajun country. Louisiana has been home to trumpeter Louis Armstrong, disgraced televangelist Jimmy Swaggart, demagogue Huey Long and author Walker Percy. The state, which has the nation's widest gap between rich and poor, is a quirky mix of Catholic and Protestant, oil and sugarcane, jazz and Zydeco.

Last week heated Duke-Edwards arguments reverberated throughout the state, from radio talk shows to restaurants, bars and business offices. A record 64,000 people turned out at the last minute to register to vote in the Nov. 16 runoff election. Audrey Triche, a computer operator in Jefferson Parish, near New Orleans, plans to vote for Duke. "We want a change," she says. "We need it, but where do we go for it? Everybody agrees with what he's saying. Why should you come to work when you can pick up a welfare check? That's why I'm going to vote for him." Her fellow office worker, Georgie Haggerty, will vote for Edwards. "He's crooked," she says, "but he's an honest crook." "We don't ask for free things because we're white or Catholic or have blue eyes," contends Robert Fruge, 29, of Metairie, the predominantly white New Orleans suburb that is Duke's stronghold. "Why should anyone else ask for them?"

Similarly indignant questions are being echoed all over Louisiana. In the thick piney woods near Mansfield, in the rural, Protestant north, Duke recently gave some 150 white partisans at a local V.F.W. hall his well- modulated litany of how an inept government and its wasteful social programs are taking advantage of law-abiding middle-class folks. "There is no bigger problem we have in Louisiana and in the country than the rising welfare underclass," he told them. "We're never going to have fiscal reform in Louisiana until we have welfare reform."

Though Duke has formally repudiated his Klan past, an undercurrent of racism lurks beneath his reasoned arguments. When he talks about welfare, crime, drugs or affirmative action, he is talking about race. "I believe in equal rights for all, special privilege for none," says Duke. That seemingly laudable concept is a thinly veiled appeal to frustrated whites who feel they are victims of reverse discrimination. It is a clever ploy, and one whose attraction stretches far beyond the racist vote. A master at driving wedges through the electorate by exploiting race-linked issues, Duke is moving these once taboo topics from the back room to the public forum. As one wizened Cajun in Donaldsonville puts it, "He tell it like it is. He ain't scared."

Duke's approach has an enormous appeal -- despite an unsavory past that he now writes off as a "wrong attitude." A swastika-brandishing neo-Nazi in college, he joined the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan in high school and worked himself up to the exalted rank of grand wizard before leaving the organization in 1979. Soon after, he founded a white supremacist group called the National Association for the Advancement of White People. The divorced father of two teenage daughters, Duke held no regular job before his election to the state legislature. He has supported himself as a seller of racist and anti-Semitic literature and as a professional fund raiser for his own right-wing causes.

Duke, whose intense blue eyes betray an inner fanaticism, tries to shrug off his past. "I'm not a racist," he says during an interview in the two-story Metairie home that doubles as his headquarters. "I was too intolerant in an earlier time in my life. But I certainly am not now." Though his disavowal drips with disingenuousness, it is winning converts -- particularly among educated middle-class voters who sense something is terribly wrong with the state. Duke, who fancies comparisons with Boris Yeltsin, appeals to the same kind of throw-the-bums-out impulse that the Russian leader has used to uproot the entrenched order in his country.

Duke's disenchanted voters not only want to sweep out the old professional governing class; they want someone to crack down on crime, drugs and welfare cheats. In a time of high unemployment, they want assurances that their job security will not be further eroded by affirmative action and set-aside programs. Duke bristles at the suggestion that he exploits racial fear. But until he offers credible evidence of change, other than his professed embrace of the Christian faith, that protest rings hollow.

Edwards, like Duke, has an image problem rooted in his own troubled past. Though his womanizing, high-rolling ways may endear him to many voters in a state that has always loved a good rascal, even Louisianians have a limited tolerance for corruption these days. During his previous term as Governor, Edwards was indicted twice on charges that he had conspired to rig state hospital approvals while out of office. Though he was acquitted, tales of extravagant gambling trips and debts paid off with cash-filled suitcases have ^ continued to dog him. But they also spark his campaign for redemption. As the well-scrubbed, silver-haired Cajun traipses across the state like a visiting potentate, he exhorts supporters, "Lache pas la patate! ((Don't drop the potato!)) I made my mistakes, and I benefited by them. I'm running to complete the job I started."

Whoever wins on Nov. 16 will inherit a spate of challenges: social, environmental, political and, above all, economic. For all the charm of the French Quarter and the sparkling new downtown hotels, New Orleans faces some of the worst urban problems of any U.S. city. With the local economy gripped by a decade-long recession, big industry is disappearing; the river port is languishing; schools are crumbling; the tax base is shrinking; the regional jobless rate stands at 6.8%. Drugs and crime run rampant in many neighborhoods, and the murder rate is among the nation's highest. "The jails are jam-packed; courts are jam-packed," says Mayor Sidney Barthelemy. "The police no longer have time to handle the minor calls. They're out on major crimes. To say the economy has had a devastating effect on the city is to put it mildly." Tourism and the promise of revenues from riverboat gambling offer some hope. But the specter of a Duke governorship chills many business leaders, who think tourists will stop coming and companies will leave the state if he is elected.

New Orleans' problems reflect the stagnation of a state that relies on natural resources, from oil to sugarcane, as its main source of income. In the days of Huey Long, the populist strongman of the 1930s, oil money was the lubricant for a vast share-the-wealth program that provided the public with highways, charity hospitals, free textbooks and old-age pensions; largely shielded from taxes, the people tolerated the corruption that went along with the system. But that party is long since over. When oil prices went bust in the past decade, so did the state treasury, which now faces a projected $1 billion budget deficit for the coming year. Though things have gotten a little better since 1987, Louisiana still has trouble attracting new business. That's because business bears a heavier, and more unpredictable, tax burden than the state's residents, who have long gotten a nearly free ride.

Despite his aloof style, Roemer tried hard to deal with Louisiana's problems. He started to clean up the environment, raised teachers' salaries, created trust funds for transportation and wetlands and sought to revise the tax structure. He managed to improve the state's bond rating and pushed through new campaign-finance laws that have drastically curbed the multimillion-dollar electoral extravaganzas of the past. Elected as a Democrat, he was a prize convert to the Republican Party when he defected last March. But Roemer may have moved too fast and too abruptly for his state. And in the end, he met the fate of most Louisiana reformers: he lasted one term.

With reporting by Don Winbush/Winnfield and Richard Woodbury/Lafayette