Clean sheets for the Klan
Strickland, Carol
REPORT FROM LOUISIANA CLEAN SHEETS FOR THE KLAN DAVID DUKE'S RACE FOR THE SENATE I've got a past," Louisiana state Representative David Duke told me in a recent interview. The handsome,...
...Botnick, who as executive director of the Anti-Defamation League of New Orleans has followed Duke's career...
...Even if he loses this time out, he will have gained considerable campaign funds and publicity for his cause...
...In his last race, Duke gathered 80 percent of his financial support from out of state...
...He hopes to gather a considerably larger campaign chest this time with his national appeals...
...With the Senate race eight months off, Duke has begun to downplay his views on eugenics, emphasizing more mainstream issues, such as lowering taxes and abolishing minority set-asides...
...But with oil prices now on the upswing, Louisiana is beginning to emerge from its five-year depression...
...Senate, Duke has proclaimed his intention to run as an unendorsed Republican...
...I don't see any problems with vasectomies," he has said...
...We're talking about America led by the American majority...
...Furthermore, to win the Senate race in a state where 26 percent of the registered voters are black, Duke would have to carry 65 percent of the white vote, a seemingly impossible number...
...Duke gained legitimacy and broadened his political base by opposing property taxes (85 percent of Louisiana homeowners pay none), and claimed credit when the tax overhaul was defeated by popular vote...
...Duke's leadership in the Klan may be formally over, but in 1980 he founded (and currently heads) the National Association for the Advancement of White People, a gentrified version of the Klan...
...Insofar as racial tensions were increased by competition for jobs and fear of hard times, the need for a scapegoat and savior may now be fading...
...A lot of these people have multiple mates...
...Her articles have appeared in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and The Nation...
...As he told me recently, "David Duke has not changed his skin...
...Yet, according to Ed Ren wick, director of the Loyola Institute for Politics, Duke is "a person you should never underestimate...
...forced integration and busing," "stop the foreign buying of America," "stop molly-coddling criminals," and "end the love affair between our state department and Communists such as Marxist terrorists who attack our Christian ally-South Africa...
...Often bills Duke introduced-all of which related to racial issues-only one passed, and that in such amended form as to be unrecognizable...
...Duke's chances in his current race require that voters be vulnerable to the same appeals...
...And a not-so-distant past...
...In tandem with lowering the welfare birth rate, Duke wants to provide incentives for the "top 10 percent of college graduates to get extra breaks to have children...
...We're creating a movement for the preservation of our heritage...
...And that cause has not changed...
...Immediately after last year's narrow election victory (Duke won by 224 votes out of 17,000 cast), Duke capitalized on his giant-killer image by leading the charge against Governor Buddy Roemer's tax reform initiative...
...After collecting more than $300,000, he is now mounting an aggressive telemarketing campaign...
...Rammed by a recession resulting from falling oil prices, the state economy had sunk as low as sea level...
...Duke's election last year benefited from a combination of circumstances favoring the radical right...
...Last month he completed a mail solicitation to all the state's 1.5 million registered voters...
...His campaign is off to a brisk start...
...His momentum fizzled, however, when he showed himself more adept at speechmaking than at lawmaking...
...After his election to the Louisiana House of Representatives in February 1989 from Metairie, a predominantly white suburb of New Orleans, he remarked that, "I think Zionism is a form of racism," and that accounts of the Holocaust are "exaggerated" or "misrepresented" to win support for Israel...
...Whatever the outcome of this fall's Senate race, David Duke is a force to be reckoned with...
...According to Newsweek (December 25,1989), he might draw enough votes to hold Johnson below 50 percent and force a runoff...
...He maintains ongoing ties to such anti-Semitic groups as the Liberty Lobby, which he calls "a pro-American organization...
...With 12 percent unemployment, the highest in the nation, a middle-class, man-the-barricades paranoia gripped the suburbs...
...He has advocated cash bonuses for welfare recipients who voluntarily undergo tubal "litigations" [sic...
...One of his defeated bills would have added an extra year's sentence to those living in public housing convicted of a drug-related crime...
...The handsome, thirty-nine-year-old Republican does indeed...
...CAROL STRICKLAND Carol Strickland is a free-lance writer who specializes in Louisiana politics...
...His outreach strategy included advertising Klan meetings on television and hiring rock bands to replace scratchy recordings of "The Old Rugged Cross...
...Yet the state Republican party has accepted the charismatic Duke, along with his blue-collar, George Wallace-Democrat constituency...
...For most politicians, such a background and current activities would spell certain doom at the ballot box...
...As Imperial Wizard of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan from 1974-79, Duke revived the organization and presided over a boom in recruitment...
...Duke characterizes the conservative Johnson as a "reckless" liberal, lumping him with Senator Edward Kennedy and Jesse Jackson...
...One of Duke's foremost legislative goals, and a key concept in his race for the Senate, is to "eliminate the welfare incentive for more and more illegitimate births" by depriving welfare recipients of additional benefits for illegitimate children...
...You might qualify by academic record, performance in the arts, business productivity, or through aptitude testing...
...In New Orleans, where public housing projects are virtually all-black ghettos, that was tantamount to a one-year sentence just for being black...
...The former Democrat gloated to an audience of white supremacists that during the campaign, "Our kind of people began coming out of the closet...
...He brought the Klan out of the cow pasture and into the hotel meeting rooms," says LA...
...Duke styles himself as an activist for white civil rights, protesting "massive discrimination against white people...
...Although the party last month endorsed state Senator Ben Bagert to challenge third-term Democratic incumbent J. Bennett Johnston in next October's open primary for the U.S...
...I'm still saying the same things I've said for a long time...
...His senatorial platform, outlined in a letter to voters, promises to eliminate...
Vol. 117 • February 1990 • No. 4
