Bush Perplexed by Duke’s Success at Polls : Louisiana: President says the former KKK leader may be exploiting voter discontent and says he cannot support Duke because of history of racism.

President Bush said Friday he is perplexed and baffled by the rise of former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke as a Republican in Louisiana but suspects Duke might be exploiting some vague voter discontent.

Bush walked a careful line--repudiating Duke without branding Louisiana voters as racists--when asked how he thought Duke had been able to defeat Republican Gov. Buddy Roemer in a primary election last Saturday and gain a runoff election for governor against Democrat Edwin Edwards.

“I could not possibly support David Duke because of the racism and because of the very recent statements that are very troubling in terms of bigotry and all of this,” Bush said at a news conference.

“Having said that, I can’t help you on the other questions that obviously influenced a lot of very plain, honest, decent voters down there. But there’s a discontent amongst a lot of voters and maybe he touched a chord on that.”

The triumph of the onetime neo-Nazi and former grand wizard of the Louisiana Klan was especially galling to the President and his party because Duke ran as a Republican despite party disavowal.

Roemer symbolized the gains Republicans have been making of late in the once-solidly Democratic South. Bush had campaigned for him to help preserve those gains as well as to avoid the embarrassment of a Duke win.

Duke, who celebrated Adolf Hitler’s birthday until the mid-1980s, now claims to have no connection with the Klan or neo-Nazi groups.

But he has nonetheless emerged as America’s best-known and most controversial radical-right politician, having already won election to the Lousiana Legislature and made a much-publicized run for a U.S. Senate seat last year.

He has not run an openly racist campaign for the governorship this year, but his speeches attack welfare cheaters, denounce job quotas to help blacks and focus on other issues likely to stir up racial animosities among the middle-class whites who anchor his constituency.

White House spokesmen had already denounced Duke as a false Republican and expressed hopes that Louisianians would rally around Roemer as a write-in candidate in the Nov. 16 election.

But Bush shied away quickly Friday when asked if he personally would advise Louisiana voters to take that course.

“I’m not going to inject myself in here except to say that we can never in any way support David Duke for the reasons I gave,” he said. “And so please don’t try to draw me into a runoff in that state. I’m not going to be so drawn.”