Politics Why Bigotry Still Works At Election Time

By Dan Goodgame/Washington

Demagogues don't yell "nigger" or "Jew boy" anymore. They've learned better. Just as David Duke shed his Klansman's sheets and Nazi uniform for the well-groomed banality of a suburban stockbroker, he traded in his bigoted rhetoric for a slick new glossary of coded appeals to racial resentment, market tested over the past two decades by mainstream conservative politicians. When Duke, following Richard Nixon's lead, denounces hiring "quotas," many among his white working-class supporters hear him saying, The government is going to give your jobs to blacks. When Duke, like Ronald Reagan, castigates "welfare queens," nobody has to be told what color they are.

John Sununu, the White House chief of staff, observed in the course of denouncing Duke on the eve of last Saturday's election, "If he succeeds, it will be by appearing to run not as a racist." Yet the sad truth is that Duke has been exploiting a political style and strategy that Governors, Senators and Presidents have been using to win elections since 1968, the year Democrat George Wallace demonstrated that white populism, stripped of overtly racist language, could attract support outside the South.

Disguised race baiting persists in politics for a simple reason: it works. "Some of us would like to get beyond this business of scaring people and dividing them against blacks," says one of George Bush's closest political advisers, "but it's hard to argue against a formula that's seen as successful." The tactic has succeeded best in states and districts where the minority population is large enough that whites can be made to feel threatened by it. When George Brown ran for re-election as Tennessee's first black supreme court justice in 1980, he says he got more support from white hillbillies who had never met a black professional than he did from whites in the Nashville area, where, Brown says, "a lot of whites think they know about blacks."

Racial tactics can backfire if they are ill-timed or overly strident. Many white voters will abandon any candidate who they judge has crossed the line into blatant racism. Several top political aides, including the late Lee Atwater, counseled Bush to sign the civil rights bill passed by Congress last year, rather than make an issue of quotas so long before his next campaign. "Quotas are a legitimate issue," says one G.O.P. strategist, "but I thought it couldn't be sustained for 24 months without making a mistake. And ( when you make a mistake on this issue, it's a big mistake because it gets you labeled racist, and there's nothing more sensitive with our yuppie constituency."

While many politicians are accused of employing racial euphemisms, all deny guilt. The line between legitimate debate and appeals to racism is often fuzzy and turns on the good faith and background of the candidate. Candidates rarely play the race card as baldly as North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms did in 1990 in his race against Democrat Harvey Gantt, the black former mayor of Charlotte. Helms, who refers to blacks as "Freds" and has for decades been hostile to civil rights legislation, was eight points behind Gantt three weeks before the election. Then he ran an 11th-hour TV ad showing the hands of a white man crumpling a rejection slip for a job that had been reserved for a "racial quota." Many Republicans as well as Democrats denounced the ad for inflaming racial animosity. But it worked: Helms came from behind to win, 52% to 48%.

In other cases, however, Republicans as well as conservative Democrats protest that many blacks and liberals are too quick to cry "racist" at any attempt to discuss explosive, racially tinged issues such as welfare, crime and affirmative action. "There is no reason for Republicans to be ashamed to talk about racial preferences in terms of equal opportunity," says former Republican Party chairman Bill Bennett. "You're probably going to get called a racist, but that won't stick if you establish credibility on these issues by spending time among black people, in schools and on street corners," debating them instead of talking about them. Housing Secretary Jack Kemp, who spends more time among working-class blacks than any other Bush adviser, says that "if you don't have a positive message to balance talk of racial quotas, you're going to come across to blacks as discriminating."

In the recently published book Chain Reaction, authors Thomas and Mary Edsall write that race "is no longer a straightforward, morally unambiguous force in American politics." Instead, the Edsalls contend, considerations of race permeate voter attitudes toward such issues as taxation, equal opportunity, public safety and moral values. Racism alone, they say, fails to explain why large numbers of white, formerly Democratic voters have defected to the G.O.P. Worse yet, from the Democratic standpoint, blasting the defectors as bigots instead of exploring the complicated reasons for their disaffection only angers them. "Democratic liberals' reliance on charges of racism guarantees political defeat," the Edsalls write, "and . . . guarantees continued ignorance of the dynamics at the core of presidential politics."

Though some Democrats hope Duke will sully the G.O.P. as a racist party, Democrats must share the blame for Duke's success and the rising national appetite for Duke's scapegoating style. Leaders of both parties attribute Duke's appeal to rising unemployment, yet as Democratic strategist James Carville, a native of Louisiana, observes, it is Democrats who are held most responsible for "failing to define ourselves as we traditionally have, as the party that defends the interests of working people of all races."

Polling and focus-group studies by both parties show that working-class voters increasingly believe the system is loaded in favor of the rich and the poor, at the expense of the middle. "They see that the top of America and the bottom don't operate by the same rules as the rest of us," says Elaine Kamarck, senior fellow at the Progressive Policy Institute in Washington. "The big executives run companies into the ground and give themselves big bonuses. The welfare recipients take drugs, engage in crime and have babies they can't afford, while the legal secretary is scrimping and saving to afford another kid." These voters consider both parties to be controlled by wealthy campaign contributors but view the Democrats as also beholden to other "special interests," including blacks. Many of Duke's supporters "don't resent blacks as blacks," says a Republican pollster. "They resent them as a special-interest group that gets special favors."

Democrats also must share with Republicans the responsibility for the barrenness of political debate in which Duke has thrived. When the subject is welfare, for example, few leaders of either party point out that the major programs for the poor constitute about 6% of federal spending -- far less than the value of corporate tax breaks and other welfare for the wealthy. "You can't write off Duke's voters as racists," says Tony Snow, the chief White House speechwriter. "Duke is talking about things people really care about: high taxes, crummy schools, crime-ridden streets, welfare dependency, equal opportunity. A lot of politicians aren't talking about these things."

Harris Wofford, the liberal Democrat who upset former Attorney General Dick Thornburgh for a Senate seat from Pennsylvania two weeks ago, understood the impatience of working-class voters with Democrats who talk more about the agendas of gay and feminist activists than about lunch-box economic issues. Wofford avoided that mistake by talking mostly about jobs and health insurance. Fred Steeper, a Republican pollster who surveyed Louisiana voters before the recent primary vote, observes that "Duke is tapping into the same middle-class frustration as Wofford" -- but in a far more destructive way.

Duke ran for President (on the Populist Party ticket) in 1988 and may well do so in 1992 (as a Republican). And although most of Bush's political advisers see little threat to the President's re-election from the ex- Klansman, some fear he could peel away Republican votes as a third-party candidate in the general election, as Wallace did to the Democrats in 1968 and 1972. If Duke runs, he will surely attack Bush for signing a civil rights bill little different from the one he vetoed as a "quota bill" in 1990.

Bush believes his racial attitudes are above reproach because of the support he has given the United Negro College Fund since he was a Yale undergraduate in the 1940s and because he has reached out widely to black leaders and spoken at black colleges. At the same time, critics observe, Bush opposed the 1964 Civil Rights Act. During his 1988 campaign, Bush almost never went into black neighborhoods to ask for votes. And his campaign relied heavily on TV spots focusing on Willie Horton, a black murderer who raped a white woman while on furlough from a Massachusetts prison.

Bush has a talent for convincing himself that his motives are pure. When he nominated Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court, for example, he was asked whether it mattered to him that Thomas was black. "I picked the best man for the job," Bush declared, adding that if Thomas happened to be black and maintained a black presence on the high court, "so much the better." That would seem to be Bush's attitude toward racial code. When his campaign harps on Willie Horton, Bush believes he is only making a point about crime. If some voters find the pitch more persuasive because Horton is black -- well, so much the better.