New Orleans
Record collections, like medicine cabinets, tell more about a person than they’d ever want us to know. So after trekking to the Mandeville, La., home of David Duke — congressional candidate and former Grand Wizard of the KKK — I ask to see his platters. At first, he refuses. But then, not recognizing the danger of a stranger searching for the vinyl equivalent of hemorrhoid cream, he foolishly relents.
Mandeville is a perfectly landscaped, white-flight suburb that nestles on the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain just outside New Orleans — the greatest music city in the world. So I hold out hope that Duke’s listening taste is miscegenated with Louis Armstrong or Professor Longhair — but no. “I don’t have any objection to black music,” Duke says “it’s just not really my style.” Instead, he displays his nerd rock (Dan Fogelberg, Cat Stevens), his showtunes (The Sound of Music soundtrack), his German composers (Beethoven, Wagner), and, oh yes, his Hitler speeches. At least I think they’re Hitler speeches. When I pull out the album cover, it says “Hitler.” As Duke violently shoves it back into the stack, refusing to let me read the rest of the title, he says, “That’s just speeches. Don’t use that, ’cause you’re gonna use that against me. . . . I have a lot of historical stuff.”
And how. There’s the “White Man’s Bible,” the Oktoberfest beer steins from his frequent trips to Bavaria, the cluttered library that has a variety of titles from Dune to the works of Ezra Pound to the vintage 1940s Hitler scrapbook with ornately serifed German text. (“It’s a historical book, it’s a collector’s item,” he explains.) But back to the record collection. What does it reveal? That Duke is one of the few Dan Fogelberg fans who is also a Nazi. Should this surprise us? Probably not. Though Duke has made token efforts to renounce his past, it’s long been known that he sold white supremacist literature out of his office when he was in the state legislature, that he’d rant at the bumbling Nazis in Hogan’s Heroes, that he once favored the Fuhrer’s combover as opposed to the sideburns-free, Baptist-choir-director coif he currently sports.
Here in Louisiana, Duke long ago ceased to shock. Sure, now that he’s running for Bob Livingston’s House seat in a May 1 special election (Livingston having retired after Larry Flynt threatened to expose his past indiscretions), and even though he’s polling in single digits, reporters are streaming in to play kick the cripple. Meet the Press’s Tim Russert hosted him in the middle of the Kosovo crisis in order to savage Duke over his new book, My Struggle — scratch that, My Awakening. It’s a 717-page dump on African-American anthropology (blacks seem “lethargic” when working in cold weather) and on “The Jewish Question.” After his Meet the Press appearance, Duke got 50,000 hits on his Web site, where he sells everything from books to beer-can huggies.
The non-Duke supporting locals, however, regard him not as an appalling curiosity, but as a disease. Not just any disease, mind you, but herpes simplex: Duke lies dormant for several years in between elections, which he usually loses. He subsists by selling his mailing lists and literature. Then, at the most inopportune moments, he flares up, embarrassing the state.
While everybody insists Duke’s on the fringe, he enjoys an uneasy peace. Some state Republicans, like Governor Mike Foster, who has refused to denounce Duke, are afraid to give him publicity or rile his supporters. State Democrats, who are largely conservative, also refrain from publicly disparaging Duke. Not only do they hope to sop up his sizable working-class-Democrat support, but the national party can’t help but root for Duke to ascend to prominence, since he’s useful for fund-raising, and for poking Republicans in the eye (ironically, Duke was a Democrat until 1989, and if he were to win, he’d join Democratic senator Robert Byrd as the only former Klansmen currently serving in Congress).
Tag along to any political event with Duke, and you’ll see he gets a gentle ride. At a Chamber of Commerce candidates’ luncheon in Metairie, Duke and I are talking about his favorite subject (the Jews), when we are interrupted by Jack Capella, the former DA of Jefferson Parish and a one-time prospective candidate for Livingston’s seat.
“Good luck, brutha!” Capella says, as he pumps Duke’s hand.
“Decided not to get involved in this one, huh?” Duke asks.
“With you involved in it,” Capella says, “who’s gonna beat you?”
As Capella walks away, a very pleased Duke nods conspiratorially in his direction, “You should talk to him.” So I do. Out of Duke earshot, I ask Capella if he thinks Duke could actually win. “He’s always been on the fringe, and we ignore him,” says Capella, cracking an indulgent smile. “We talk to him — ‘Go David!’ But it’s kind of like your crazy uncle. He’s your family, you know he’s there, you say hello, and then you leave.”
Accurately handicapping an election in Louisiana is as perilous an endeavor as playing the ponies. On occasion, you’ll hit, but as Damon Runyon cautioned, “All horseplayers die broke.” The difficulties are largely the fault of Edwin Edwards, the perenially indicted former governor, who once joked that he had a lot in common with Duke, being himself a “wizard under the sheets.” When not bedding women half his age or shooting dice in Vegas, Edwards decided to vanquish his opponents by overhauling election law. In an effort to rid the Democratic party of Republican pretenders who registered to run Democrat since they couldn’t win as Republicans, Edwards instituted open primaries. If a candidate doesn’t win at least 50 percent of the vote, there is a runoff between the top two candidates, regardless of party.
Republicans, of course, have grown in number, and today the state often sees rowdy, crowded fields where moderates cannibalize each other’s support, and fringe candidates sometimes slip into the runoff. What this means is that any yobbo with an entry fee and a dream can make serious mischief in elections, and in Louisiana, they often do. Surveying the field at two candidate forums, it becomes clear that Duke may not even be the lead eccentric.
For instance, there’s Democrat Darryl Ward, a former muffler salesman who won’t crack one percent but who’s been arrested several times. He sports a white Panama hat and yells at his Alliance for Good Government interrogators, punctuating his nonsequiturs with “Amen and Amen!” Then there’s Patrick Landry, a Republican electrician who vows never to be involved in a Livingston-like scandal, since “I’m a 33-year-old virgin.” (“He’s got the 33-year-old male-virgin vote sewn up,” confides Duke.) Rounding out the bottom tier is S. J. LoCoco, an ornery seersuckered surgeon, whom unfamiliar voters sometimes call “Mr. Rococo.”
At the bottom of the top tier is Republican Rob Couhig, owner of the minor-league New Orleans Zephyrs baseball team. Couhig is spending a small fortune to get taken seriously, but may be undermining his efforts with mailers that read, “Rob isn’t afraid to step up to the plate. Born with a handicap — he’s blind in one eye — Rob Couhig has more vision than anyone you’ll ever meet.” Next comes Monica Monica — “Monica squared” to her friends — a painfully chipper ophthalmologist who vows not to get on the congressional health plan (who cares?). Then there’s Republican David Vitter, a sanctimonious state representative and 64-point-plan type who has brought ethics complaints against Edwards’s gambling junkets and who incessantly decries cronyism, a habit that reflects poorly on a man’s character in the home of Huey Long and Edwin Edwards (not a single legislative colleague has endorsed Vitter).
Leading the pack is Republican Dave Treen, a former governor who trails only Duke in name recognition but who, at 70, is fighting ring rust — he hasn’t held elective office since 1983. While Treen is liked by the electorate and even his opponents, he has one problem, according to Harry “Chinese Cowboy” Lee, the all-powerful 351-pound Democratic sheriff of Jefferson Parish who endorsed Treen (and who is Chinese and a cowboy). Treen’s “age is his only down side,” says Lee. “That, and the fact that he’s a very dull person.” Actually, as governor of freewheeling Louisiana, Treen was thought to be so unnecessarily deliberative when making decisions that Edwards famously cracked: Treen “takes an hour-and-a-half to watch 60 Minutes.“
Playing spoiler in this five-parish district that’s gone Republican for 21 years is the staunchly conservative Democrat Bill Strain, a state representative from David Duke’s home parish of St. Tammany. Thus far, Strain’s been a phantom, having aired his first ads just last week and skipped all the candidate forums. But local sages say Strain has a good chance of finishing in the money just by siphoning off the Democrats’ 20 percent of the electorate, who’ll be confused by so many Republican contenders.
Then there’s Duke. Local wisdom has it that Duke is completely washed up, which may be wishful thinking. Since Duke gained national prominence some ten years ago, his non-KKK stump issues have been largely appropriated by others (and Chamber of Commerce diners don’t much care to discuss the Protocols of the Elders of Zion). His anti-welfare, anti-immigration, anti-affirmative action screeds, which he veers into no matter what questions are proffered, have a quaint 1994 sort of feel. But his Kwanzaa-vs.- Christmas, our-schools-are-going-to-hell, preserve-our-heritage rhetoric is straight from this morning’s headlines and can still fire up white voters. While there is not as compelling a reason to vote for Duke in a field so conservative that even the grandfatherly Treen has called for the public execution of drug dealers, Duke still appeals to the contingent known locally as the “F.U. vote” — disgruntled about race, disgruntled about having to wear shrimp-boots for a living, disgruntled about you name it.
In fact, so enthused is Duke about Louisiana’s First District (where black voters have generally been gerrymandered away) that two hours after Livingston resigned, Duke announced his intent to run. In this district, which contains a sliver of Orleans Parish, the white-flight suburbs of Jefferson Parish and the north shore, as well as rural farms, Duke has a chance to play spoiler. It was out of Jefferson Parish, the most affluent in Louisiana, that he was elected state representative in 1989. In his home parish of St. Tammany, he engineered his election as the executive director of the parish’s Republican party. And in the northernmost Washington Parish, a rural area so bedrock in its backwardness that some south-of-the-lake Louisianans prefer to call it Mississippi, Duke signs can be spotted high atop towering pines: signs, by the way, that come not from this congressional race, but from Duke’s gubernatorial run in 1991.
Right now, Republicans are drawing solace from what little polling has been done, which shows Duke in sixth place, though within ten points of everybody but Treen. But as Ken Johnson, spokesman for Rep. Billy Tauzin says, “Anybody who rules Duke out just doesn’t know Louisiana politics.” And while some locals think Tauzin was alarmist or publicity-hungry for making noise about picking a unity candidate to keep Duke out of the May 29 runoff (an inevitability, as no one will pull 50 percent in the May 1 election), Tauzin possesses what other state Republicans might benefit from: an appreciation of history.
It is an established fact that Duke supporters don’t like talking about their man to pollsters: Just how many Duke supporters are flying under the radar, is the question. In his 1990 Senate race, Duke was outpolled by incumbent J. Bennett Johnston 60 percent 23 percent, but he ended up losing by only 54 percent 43.5 percent. In his 1991 run for governor, Duke was outpolled by incumbent Buddy Roemer by a full 10 points. He beat Roemer by 5 points, only to get stomped in the runoff by Edwin Edwards who benefited from “Vote for the Crook, It’s Important” bumper stickers, as well as from the 70,000 black voters who were registered statewide in two days (not an option, in this lily-white district). While Duke detractors like to illustrate his diminished influence by pointing to his Senate bid in 1996 (he failed to make the runoff, scoring just 12 percent of the vote in a race where Democrat Mary Landrieu beat Republican Woody Jenkins), the circumstances were unique. Afraid that a Republican wouldn’t make the runoff against two strong Democratic candidates, state Republicans rallied behind Jenkins as a unity candidate (which is unlikely to happen in this race).
There are several other considerations that indicate Duke may not yet be finished. Nobody knows how many voters the middling moderates are pulling from Treen. Nobody knows if the Democrat Strain, finally rousted from hibernation, might soften Treen’s support. Most important, low turnout is expected to benefit Duke. And in an off-year special election that takes place on the same day as JazzFest, anyone who has seen Duke’s record collection can safely report that he is the candidate least likely to lose voters to Buckwheat Zydeco.
On the other hand, maybe Duke is washed up: If so, he says, that’s fine: “I still have my ideas.” A lot of ideas, in fact — some about blacks (they are less buoyant and have wider nostrils, which help them draw more air during fistfights), and the rest about Jews. Get Duke off the stump, where he almost sounds normal, and into private conversation while rambling across the 24-mile Pontchartrain Causeway in his Cadillac, and you’ll be treated to a distended exegesis on the Jews’ responsibility for everything from the Russian Revolution to the Gulf War to airport metal detectors. When I ask him if he has any Jewish friends, he looks incredulous. “Of course I have,” he says, “my dentist.”
At times Duke almost seems pitiable, as he slaloms between crusty catfish plates after lunch at the Chamber of Commerce hall, picking up discarded campaign literature (“Don’t want to waste anything,” he says). Or sitting in an empty television studio, feeding live to Hannity & Colmes, where he gets so beat up that his cosmetic surgery looks to be coming undone (this appearance resulted in several hundred sympathy e-mails, and God knows how many beer-can huggy sales). But he is unperplexed. Driving home from the studio, I ask what ever became of his Grand Wizard outfit. “Oh, it’s probably all packed away in the attic somewhere for the grandchildren to marvel at,” he shrugs. “If I’m ever broke, I can sell it to Sotheby’s.”
Matt Labash is a staff writer at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
