UPDATE / LOUISIANA BATTLE : Senator Turns Angry Populist in Race With Ex-KKK Leader

For 18 years, U.S. Sen. J. Bennett Johnston has kept a low profile. So low, in fact, that one poll earlier this year showed that the three-term Democratic incumbent was unknown by almost a majority of Louisiana voters.

But, as he runs for reelection in an open primary on Oct. 6, Johnston has become a household word--largely because his principal opponent is state Rep. David Duke, a former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard with connections to the American Nazi Party.

As a result, as the usually quiet Johnston travels the hot and dusty campaign trial, he has adopted the style of an angry, voice-raising populist--a style that has brought success to many other Louisiana politicians.

“If I had done one-tenth of what David Duke has done, one-tenth, why, they’d ride me out of town on a rail,” Johnston told a group of supporters in the tiny town of Farmerville. “Why, this is a man who has celebrated Adolf Hitler’s birthday every year.”

The campaign is also an opportunity for Johnston to rid himself of an albatross that has long haunted his career--the perception that he has never had a serious opponent and has, as one writer put it, “led a charmed political life.” In many ways he has: He was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1972 after his chief opponent, incumbent Allen Ellender died, and has won two landslide elections since then against token opposition.

Skepticism about Johnston’s ability to win against a stronger opponent heightened this summer as polls showed his support dropping from more than 60% to less than 45%. Meanwhile, Duke, a charismatic figure on the hustings who has tapped into a large vein of anger and alienation among Louisiana voters frustrated by the state’s economic recession, has been attracting far larger crowds than Johnston, and his support has grown from less than 15% to almost 30%.

Bob Mann, Johnston’s campaign spokesman, said the senator’s tactic of attacking Duke “would probably have been a foolish mistake in a normal election simply because Johnston is the well-established incumbent and Duke is the challenger. But this is not a normal election. Just as many people in Louisiana know Duke as . . . know Johnston, but a lot of people still don’t know about Duke’s past, so the senator has felt the need to educate them.”

To Susan F. Howell, a political pollster for the University of New Orleans, Johnston’s decision to attack Duke is a wise one. “At this point, Johnston is on the verge of winning . . . he’s very near having a majority of votes. Attacking Duke may bring Johnston enough undecided voters to push him over the top.”

But Jim McPherson, state coordinator for Duke, thinks the Johnston attack “is an act of desperation. If you’re an 18-year incumbent, normally you’d have the high ground and you’d talk about all of your great accomplishments and your record, but here’s Johnston reduced to having to attack his opponent . . . . He’s in trouble and he knows it.”

The Duke forces think Johnston’s greatest vulnerability may be his voting record in Washington, a record Duke, running as a Republican, repeatedly attacks. Duke likes to remind voters that it was Johnston who led the Southern Democratic charge against U.S. Supreme Court nominee Robert H. Bork, thereby almost ensuring Bork’s rejection in the Senate, and that Johnston has continued to vote in favor of affirmative action legislation.

But, in this battle of the records, the Johnston campaign has been equally vociferous, pointing not only to Duke’s past Nazi and KKK affiliations but also to a disclosure that Duke underwent extensive plastic surgery and once wrote manuals on how women can sexually satisfy their male partners.

“There are a lot of isolated rural areas in this state that don’t get any of the big urban newspapers who’ve been doing all of this reporting on Duke’s past,” Mann said. “For the people in those areas, this is all news.”