Louisiana The No-Win Election

By MICHAEL RILEY/NEW ORLEANS

In the privacy of the voting booth, it came down to a balance of terror. After riding out the historic race between neo-Nazi David Duke and rapscallion Edwin Edwards, Louisianians had to choose between Duke's appeal to white hostility and fear of the economic chaos and racial divisions that his victory promised. In the end, their pocketbooks and qualms about Duke prevailed.

Throughout the campaign, Edwards supporters warned that if Louisiana elected a former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan as Governor, a wave of revulsion would sweep business, tourism, conventions and jobs out of the state. Duke skillfully manipulated the politics of discontent, playing on resentment of quotas, welfare and Big Government. He railed against Edwards' liberalism and his penchant for gambling and womanizing and trading government jobs for campaign contributions. But in the end, the bumper sticker won the day: VOTE FOR THE CROOK: IT'S IMPORTANT. Concluding that electing a bigot would be too costly to a state in dire economic straits, voters gave Edwards 60% of the vote. The turnout was an astonishing 75%.

Searching through the results for useful lessons, analysts found some disturbing truths. Anyone who thinks that Duke is merely a Bayou State phenomenon should be disabused by the numbers. More than 40% of his $1.37 million in contributions came from outside Louisiana, mostly small donations from people in 46 states. Duke's supporters were not all racists. Many were hardworking people who felt alienated from government-as-usual and desperate for help. "He says what a lot of people think but don't have the guts to say," observes oil-field supervisor Mark Hulin. "We're all middle-class people who are tired of paying taxes for all those people who don't want to better themselves." The Duke phenomenon, a volatile mix of race, class and plain rage, will not simply disappear. He may even challenge George Bush in next year's Republican primaries.

That Duke got as far as he did is perhaps the most important message of all. This, after all, is a man who has never held a regular job. He has made his living by selling hate materials and trolling for contributions for various racist organizations. He wore a swastika in college, founded the National Association for the Advancement of White People, advocated dividing America into separate ethnic nations, denied that the Holocaust happened. His reason for studying German in college was to be able to read Hitler's Mein Kampf in the original.

Yet Duke's campaign was not farfetched. He won a place in the runoff by defeating incumbent Republican Buddy Roemer, a Harvard-educated reformer whose imperious manner doomed him to a single term. Duke won blue-collar voters, largely rural, young and male. But he also made inroads into the middle class, capturing conservatives from both parties. If the election had been held just after the primary, Duke would have won.

But as the days passed, the tide slowly began to turn. First, Roemer grudgingly endorsed Edwards and urged his sullen supporters not to sit out the election. Then, in a televised debate, Duke was confounded by an emotional question about bigotry. "I am scared, sir," began black TV reporter Norman Robinson. "I've heard you say that Jews deserve to be in the ash bin of history. I've heard you say that horses contributed more to the building of America than blacks did." Robinson went on to ask why any minorities should entrust their lives to Duke -- and the moral opposition to Duke's hate- mongering past coalesced.

Then Duke hit another stumbling block. Having claimed to be born again, he was asked where he worshiped and named a church no one had seen him attend. A top campaign aide, who doubted Duke's Christianity and called him "a racist, coward, draft dodger and bald-faced liar," deserted him a few days before the election.

And finally, the magnitude of the choice facing Louisiana started to settle in, especially among New Orleans' professional class. Experts predicted that dozens of conventions worth nearly $100 million would be canceled. University of New Orleans economist Timothy Ryan put the losses at about $1.8 billion and 45,000 jobs. "Louisiana," warned James Moffett, chairman of Freeport- McMoRan, the state's second largest public company, "wouldn't just be redlined by businesses around the nation and the world, we'd be X-rated."

The anti-Duke coalition was one of the most bizarre in modern American politics. Churches, environmentalists and liberal activists joined with the Establishment to fight Duke. Former Republican Governor David Treen endorsed Edwards, who once joked that Treen was so slow it took him an hour and a half to watch 60 Minutes. Even President Bush made an 11th-hour endorsement, fearful of what a Duke victory would mean for his party's efforts to woo black voters.

But having won, Edwards will now have to govern a badly bruised and divided state. Virtually all of Duke's votes came from whites, while the black vote went for Edwards. Having won only as the lesser of evils, Edwards now owes it to all Louisianians to restore some standards of decency to his traumatized state.

With reporting by Don Winbush/Bossier City and Richard Woodbury/Houston