LOUISIANA

Eight summers ago, the national media practically set up camp in Louisiana to follow David Duke’s quest for governor. In 1989, the former Ku Klux Klan leader had won election to the state house as a Republican, jolting the GOP’s national landscape. Two years later, Duke knocked the incumbent governor out of the primary and was headed into a runoff with Edwin W. Edwards, a three-time former governor and rouge of the first stripe. Suddenly, Duke was on television everywhere, red hot, a celebrity.

In the mid-’80s, Edwards had been twice tried and acquitted of federal racketeering charges. Well before politicians’ sex lives became media fodder, Edwards joked about his extramarital escapades, boasting in 1983 that he was “safe with voters unless caught with a dead woman or a live boy.” Running against Duke, the Cajun issued faint mea culpas for his environmental policies, which helped turn Louisiana into a toxic-waste dump. Edwards knew that an anachronism like himself was vastly preferable to Duke, whose surgically altered face symbolized the makeover of a man who had espoused Nazi eugenics and had sold books that proclaimed the Holocaust a myth.

A bumper sticker said it all: “Vote for the Crook. It’s important.” Edwards scored a landslide, winning 61% of the vote, though Duke attracted some 600,000 white votes.

That was the political high point of Duke’s popularity. A 1992 presidential bid quickly fizzled, and he did poorly in a 1996 race for U.S. Senate. Last April, he was again competing for office, finishing third, with only 19% of the vote in a nearly all-white district, in the contest to fill the vacant seat of former House Speaker Robert L. Livingston. Even in disaster, however, Duke has long coattails. Now he’s dragging Gov. Murphy “Mike” Foster into an unwelcome spotlight.

Foster, who succeeded Edwards in 1995, enjoyed the highest approval ratings of any sitting Louisiana governor, at one time greater than 70%. Espousing good government, he stood out in bas-relief from Edwards’ cronyism. But last month, Foster admitted that, in 1995, he paid Duke $100,000 for his computerized mailing lists. Few people who follow politics here believe the money was for the lists. The more plausible scenario is that Foster, a multimillionaire who gave up a safe state senate seat to run for governor, paid Duke to stay out of the race. The governor denies this. Foster also paid Duke an additional $50,000 in 1997 for use of the lists in the future. For about $800, anyone could have photocopied the lists, since Duke is required by law to file a list of his financial supporters with the state board.

Because he used his own money to buy the lists, the governor has said he saw no reason to report the transaction on campaign disclosure forms. Yet, time and again during the ’95 campaign, and in the years since, Foster has refused to criticize Duke, even after the recent publication of Duke’s self-published autobiography, “My Awakening,” which is freighted with conspiracy theories and denouncements of blacks, Jews and gays.

Foster’s popularity had stemmed from a scandal-free image; his administration has emphasized education and shunning favoritism in state business contracts. Many people had viewed him as above the mire of traditional politics. But in Louisiana, paying someone to stay out of a race may not be a bribe per se, but it’s politics at its most banal. After a meeting with FBI agents about the payments, Foster insisted that he is not a target of an investigation.

In part, Foster’s problems is all in the family. His grandfather, Murphy Foster, was a notorious racist. As governor in the 1890s, he engineered a poll tax to disfranchise poor white as well as black voters and helped organize the White League and White Camellia, forerunners of the Ku Klux Klan, which Duke ushered into the media age with 1970s TV appearances.

Foster’s long silence about Duke is a sad echo of his grandfather’s mentality. In failing to put the moral weight of his office against the politics of hate, Foster helped Duke on his endless quest for legitimacy--and paid him, to boot.

It is no small irony that Foster’s payments arrived at a time when Duke was dismantling his campaign for legitimacy: no more talk about “my past mistakes” or “things I would take back now.” Although Duke remains a Republican, the onslaught of media coverage in 1991 exposed a range of neo-Nazi activities in which he had participated over the years. In publishing his book and stepping up his appearances before white supremacist groups, Duke ended his quest for acceptance as a mainstream Republican.

Yet, he has certainly had an impact. Ideas have power. The Nazi books that Duke and others sold, like the hate-group Web sites proliferating on the Internet, are an ideological supply line for the likes of Timothy J. McVeigh, who blew up the federal building in Oklahoma City. McVeigh was obsessed with “The Turner Diaries,” a novel, by William Pierce, that advocates race war.

A more insidious, “ethnically based nationalism [is] moving into the American mainstream . . . the reemerging notion of this country as Anglo-American, a white country,” says Leonard Zeskin, an authority on white supremacists. Duke has been a catalyst in this movement. So, in his own way, is Foster, who lacks the moral fiber to denounce Duke. The news that he paid $150,000 to Duke won’t alienate his Duke supporters. Perhaps the blundering governor can appreciate the irony of his abetting the legal tribulations of Duke.

Meanwhile, Duke recently said on a radio talk show that he expects to be indicted, “however unjustified.” The U.S. attorney’s office in New Orleans is investigating Duke’s political fund-raising, whether he paid taxes on money made from selling his mailing lists and how he used certain funds. Some of it may have been spent at gambling tables in Las Vegas and on the Mississippi Gulf Coast.