There Is More at Stake in Louisiana Than Who Will Be Its Next Governor : Politics: Three flavors of Republicanism are running in the primary, and one of them--David Duke--is making the GOP run scared.

The Republican Party’s growing success in attracting Democratic voters in the South is not helping it overcome a central problem: Can the GOP live with a state party that tolerates appeals, subtle and direct, to racism? In Louisiana’s open primary, one of three gubernatorial candidates calling themselves Republicans openly courts racist voters. The trio are expected to share at least 65% of the Oct. 19 vote.

The Republican National Committee and the White House support incumbent Gov. Buddy Roemer, who was elected as a Democrat in 1987 but switched parties last March. The Louisiana Republican Party nominated, in June, a three-term congressman, Clyde C. Holloway. Then there is David Duke, the former Ku Klux Klan leader and neo-Nazi who was elected as a Republican to the state legislature in 1989.

Which of these three self-professing Republicans prevails will affect the future political direction of the GOP in the South, perhaps nationally.

A Roemer reelection would shore up moderates. The Harvard-educated technocrat could even be the model candidate for other ambitious Southern Republicans or Democrats who’d like to change parties. To do this, he must coax moderate Democratic voters into the GOP and assemble a party base similar to the coalitions that two Tennessee Republicans, former Gov. Lamar Alexander and former Sen. Howard H. Baker Jr., built. Faced with strong opposition on the right, Roemer is attempting to rebuild, from the top down, a state party in his own image, with a lot of help from Washington. It is not a far-fetched ambition.

Four years ago, Roemer used an anti-corruption theme to beat the Democratic incumbent, Edwin W. Edwards, who’s running again this year. Despite mounting hostility from his Democratic legislature, he pushed through teacher-evaluation programs that unions hated and vetoed the strictest anti-abortion bill in the country. Not least in importance is Roemer’s spotless record on race issues. Although he received less than 10% of the black vote in 1987, he is the only Republican actively courting black voters, more or less as a matter of principle.

The White House has invested a great deal of prestige in reelecting Roemer as a Republican. Were he to lose, other Democrats contemplating a party switch would certainly have second thoughts.

Holloway is certainly not the kind of Republican who would stir thoughts of apostasy in Democratic heads. “Down-home, not a phony, affable!” his supporters claim. His campaign theme of “family values” is fuzzy shorthand for his pro-business, pro-electric chair, anti-abortion and anti-busing sentiments. In Congress, his most notable exploit was to team up with California Rep. Bob Dornan in a failed attempt to expel Massachusetts Democrat Barney Frank for the latter’s homosexual activities.

Holloway’s single-digit appeal in opinion polls is almost exactly what the state GOP attracted a decade ago, when it was a fringe group and before conservative Democrats began defecting and taking over the state Republican machinery. Many of his supporters are Pat Robertson’s “born-agains” who, in their hearts, lean toward Duke.

Duke, of course, is the Republican National Committee’s worst nightmare, the vision of the old George Wallace wing of the Democratic Party rising undead to move into the Louisiana governor’s mansion and threaten the Republican’s base of presidential electoral votes.

Duke, as usual, is trading in racism. “We have a massive welfare underclass committing a great deal of crime--overloading our educational system--overloading our whole social welfare apparatus,” he said the other night.

There’s really nothing subtle about this appeal, and it is cause for justifiable alarm among national Republicans. President George Bush, of course, is not above using code to arouse racial fears. But there is a great difference between his opposition to “quotas” and Duke’s call for an end to “reverse discrimination.” Duke is counting on the distinction being lost on Louisiana voters.

And he may be right. The latest polls show Duke surging, at roughly 30% of the vote, to parity with Roemer and Edwards. Already, there is speculation on which candidate might run a better race against Duke in November.

Roemer and his RNC-picked staff are increasingly worried about the prospect of facing Duke in the runoff, after long assuming Edwards would be their target. Although Duke humiliated its Washington troops in 1989 and 1990, when he ran for the U.S. Senate, the RNC has never taken Duke seriously. Accordingly, it is widely suspected that Roemer has no Duke game plan.

Duke has successfully eluded attempts to make his neo-Nazi associations a negative. He has staked out a no-new-taxes position that would make Roemer sweat. Then there is the “carpetbagging” issue, which Duke has used with such devastating effect. In 1989, former President Ronald Reagan campaigned for Duke’s opponent, who lost. Last year, the last-minute endorsement of his Democratic opponent, Sen. J. Bennett Johnston, by eight northern Republican senators backfired. Roemer, with his Washington-lent staff and record of hiring non-Louisiana experts for key administration posts, is particularly vulnerable to another such attack.

It’s important to realize that Duke’s ambitions are national and that the frequent comparison of him to Huey Long, the Louisiana governor who was assassinated in 1935 while preparing a presidential race, only serves to obscure his intentions. Duke’s true role model is Wallace, for whom he campaigned two decades ago when still openly a Nazi.

For the national Republican Party, political reckoning day may be near. How long will it accept a state party that allows a Nazi to call himself a Republican? The Louisiana Republican Party, it should be remembered, has never censured Duke, despite numerous opportunities. Every Duke success under the Republican label puts added pressure on national party leaders to make the break. For them, a womanizer and a gambler might be better than Gov. Duke.