Choice Isn’t Between Duke and Edwards : Today’s Louisiana vote is a litmus test for America

Louisiana’s gubernatorial election today has taken on a national importance of almost mythic proportions. That’s because in the large arena of political villains, surely no one in recent memory is as easy to condemn as gubernatorial candidate David Duke, the former Grand Wizard of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan and Nazi sympathizer.

The Times-Picayune, Louisiana’s leading newspaper, has called the race between the Republican Duke and the Democrat, former Gov. Edwin Edwards, “the choice of our lives.” And vicariously, it is the choice of every American voter’s life.

The choice really isn’t between Duke and Edwards, whose time as governor was marred in large part by charges of corruption. Edwards has received the strong endorsement of that state’s business community and even President Bush, not because he is the best Louisiana ever had to offer, but because he isn’t Duke. It’s Duke who said in 1985 that he’d like to see African-Americans set apart from whites by “geographic separation . . . within this country or on an extracontinental basis.” It’s Duke who in 1986 said Jews “probably deserve to go into the ash bin of history.” He wants them resettled, too, “where they can’t exploit others.” It’s Duke who claims a Christian conversion, even as his own campaign aide has resigned, calling the conversion bogus.

Polls now suggest that as his record and his leadership in overtly racist movements becomes better known, Louisianians are moving away from him. But polls are notoriously unreliable in the last days of campaigns that involve race, because people too often tell pollsters they reject racist appeals while in fact they don’t.

And so it is that the David Duke problem is the problem of America. To the degree that his candidacy will force this nation to confront its conflicts about race, fairness and opportunity, he is doing us all a favor. Because it’s true that statements over time by former President Reagan and President Bush gave a kind of political respectability to Duke’s brand of demagogy--a campaign based on feral fears of “quotas” and “welfare cheats” that is nothing more than a thinly veiled attack on minorities and the poor.

But it is also true that many Democrats, through their abject timidity, have failed miserably in recent years to make the case to middle- and working-class white voters why race and gender-related social programs have had a rightful place in this multicultural nation. Most Democrats have failed, for example, to articulate the significant role affirmative action has played in prying open job doors shut to women and in creating a larger black middle class. That’s progress worth applauding. But by failing to take on the challenge of open public discussion about what affirmative action should be--and what it shouldn’t be--liberals left a void that Duke was all too happy to fill with simple-minded racist rhetoric. And when he remolded that racist rhetoric into glib sound bites, substituted his klan sheets for a business suit and added his brand of Christian contrition, it began to look like this slick opportunist could pull it off.

The polls now suggest otherwise. The nation fervently hopes that Louisianians make the right choice of their lives--for all of us.