TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/110491/1104104.000

Text File | 1992-08-31 | 13.0 KB | 271 lines

                                                                                NATION, Page 29

ELECTIONS

The Duke of Louisiana


In a state famed for bizarre politics, an ex-Klansman rides
into the gubernatorial runoff on a wave of middle-class fear and
loathing

By MICHAEL RILEY/METAIRIE -- With reporting by Don Winbush/
Winnfield and Richard Woodbury/Lafayette


    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.


________________________________________________________________
NOW THE HARD PART: PROBLEMS FOR THE NEXT GOVERNOR


    -- POLLUTION. Cancer Alley, a strip of petrochemical plants
along the Mississippi, is known for its high cancer-death rates.
The state ranks second in the nation for toxic-chemical releases.

    -- POVERTY. Louisiana ranks 49th in the country in annual per
capita income ($8,961) and has the widest gap between rich and
poor of any U.S. state. Black families, particularly in rural
areas, fare the worst.

    -- OIL RECESSION. Petroleum once kept Louisiana afloat,
accounting for more than 40% of the state's revenues; today it
provides only 15%. The reason: depressed prices and sagging
production.

    -- THREATENED WETLANDS. Swamps, bayous and marshes, typical
of the Louisiana landscape, are vanishing at a rate of more than
30 sq. mi. a year -- a problem aggravated by attempts to control
the river's flow.