David Duke

Some people wonder why so much has been made of David Duke's plastic surgery. The answer is simple. David Duke's new face is a symbol of what he seeks to do: turn back the clock and pretend to be something he is not.For every avowal in the Louisiana gubernatorial race that he is a changed man, there is a revelation about his recent past that gives it the lie. Well into the 1980s he still had the standard racist/anti-Semite spiel: race mixing is ruining America,...

Stop the presses! Buddy Roemer is no longer running for president. If Mr. Roemer's name doesn't ring a bell, don't feel bad. Although he has been campaigning doggedly for a year and a half, most Americans surely have never heard his name. Mr. Roemer, a former governor of Louisiana, has the distinction - a dubious one, to be sure - of failing miserably to gain the 2012 presidential nomination of not one but two distinct political entities: the Republican Party and the nonpartisan group Americans Elect.

Edwin Edwards defeated David Duke by the lopsided margin of 61-39 percent. This should have made all liberals, moderates and true conservatives very happy. Yet many voices from among those groups are expressing concern about the Louisiana gubernatorial voting. They say the Duke vote indicates racism is strong and rising in Louisiana, in the South and probably even in the nation.That is not true. Worry warts should savor the reality of a smashing victory. Sixty-one percent of the vote in any two-candidate race has always been and is still considered a huge landslide.

SUDDENLY, ON the television from Florida last week, white people were demonstrating. This was thrilling to see, and quite unexpected, since white people don't like to demonstrate unless we feel true political outrage, such as the lack of decent parking at shopping mall openings. But there it was, big as life from the heart of the nation's Presidential Unpleasantness. Barred from a meeting of the Miami-Dade County election canvassers, a roving gang of Republicans attempted to push its way in while chanting, "The fix is in."

The David Duke campaign may well be over before it begins. He has asked that his name not be placed on the Maryland ballot when the state holds its presidential preferential primary March 3. According to his research director, Marc Ellis, this is because Mr. Duke wants to run in the Georgia primary on the same date and in the South Carolina primary March 7.It is more likely, though, the candidate was ignorant of Maryland Republicanism, and upon learning that...

An embarrassed White House chief of staff was at pains yesterday to read David Duke, erstwhile Ku Klux Klan grand wizard and Nazi sympathizer, out of the Republican Party. He is not a Republican, said John Sununu, and the White House will give him no support in his campaign against a twice-indicted (but twice-acquitted) Democrat in the November election.But Sununu's statements aside, Duke is in fact the denouement of Republican policy dating back for 23 years. The rise of Duke, or someone like him, began in 1968 when Richard Nixon fashioned the "Southern strategy" to offset the influence of George Wallace, who at that time was the embarrassment to Democrats that David Duke is today to the Republicans.

ANNAPOLIS -- David Duke, the former Klansman running for the GOP presidential nomination, is getting closer to a spot on the Maryland primary ballot.Maryland Secretary of State Winfield M. Kelly Jr. will deliver a letter today to the State Administrative Board of Election Laws asking that Mr. Duke's name be placed on the March 3 primary ballot.The secretary of state is given wide latitude under the law in signifying which candidates are placed on the ballot. Mr. Kelly sent letters to those candidates who are reported in the media to be candidates.

When Congress enacts a new civil rights bill, Sens. John Danforth, R-Mo., and Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., will probably get the credit. But we will always think of it as the Hill-Duke Act. Anita Hill and David Duke changed the public opinion environment in the nation in recent weeks, just enough to change the political perspectives and stakes in the debate over civil rights legislation.President Bush vetoed the 1990 civil rights bill. He called each subsequent substitute version "a quota bill" and would not endorse any. Even if it were a quota bill in 1990 (and it was not, in our view)

"Backlash: Race and the American Dream" was evidently made while David Duke, the Louisiana politician best known as a former leader of the Ku Klux Klan, still seemed to be a formidable figure in the 1992 presidential campaign. But even after the collapse of his candidacy, concern over his appeal lingers. So tonight's hourlong documentary on PBS at 10 p.m. is by no means out of date.Clips from speeches and interviews show that Mr. Duke has tidied up his prose since the days when he wore the sheet and peddled Nazi pamphlets.

Sulphur, La. -- WHEN David Duke held a campaign rally here the other day about 120 people filled the banquet room at the Holiday Inn to listen attentively and cheer him on.This isn't 20,000 people packing Madison Square Garden but it ain't chopped liver either. The turnout on a bright spring 'N afternoon in this small town just west of Lake Charles was impressive enough to suggest that reports of the political demise of David Duke may be premature.The conventional wisdom among political professionals and activists here seems to be that Duke is doomed to be an also-ran in the primary for governor Oct. 19 -- despite his success in drawing 44 percent of the total vote and 60 percent of the white vote against Democratic Sen. J. Bennett Johnston last November.

MANDEVILLE, La. -- Voters rejected him in all but one of his nine campaigns for public office. His own party has largely disowned him. And some 26 watery miles over Lake Pontchartrain from here, a federal grand jury in New Orleans is investigating him.But on this recent afternoon, David Duke, the unrepentant one-time Ku Klux Klan leader, seems not to have a care in the world. Until, that is, the waitress brings him a plate of chicken teriyaki with brown rice."I'm supposed to get white," Duke tells her.Of course he is.Color colors everything for Duke, who has become even more outspoken about his views on white supremacy and racial separatism in recent years than when he first gained national attention in 1989 -- the year he was elected to the Louisiana House of Representatives.

THE DEEP SOUTH continues a disturbing and dangerous political polarization. The two poles are white Republicanism and black Democracy. The Democrats can no longer count on an alliance of working class and poor people of both races coming together to seek common political goals. That coalition worked for them for years, but in the Southern states, it's now dead.In Louisiana last weekend the non-partisan gubernatorial primary election produced two run-off candidates. One is Mike Foster, a white Republican state legislator who just switched parties.

THE DOUBLE STANDARD is alive and well among America's opinion elites. Imagine that David Duke had organized a white man's march on Washington. Would the powers-that-be have declared that while David Duke himself was objectionable, the message of the rally was ''lofty,'' to use President Clinton's phrase?No way. Every person who showed up in response to Mr. Duke's call would have been tainted as a racist or a tolerator of racists.But most whites in America still patronize blacks by declining to apply to them the standards they apply to themselves.

Washington. -- Asegment on CNN's ''Capitol Gang'' dealt with the recent announcement of presidential candidacy by California's Gov. Pete Wilson, which was delivered in front of the Statue of Liberty.The video clips showed the candidate criticizing a welfare system that offers extra money to recipients who have additional children while on welfare, decrying the fact that law-abiding Americans fear to go outside because of street crime, deploring an affirmative-action process that has evolved into de facto quotas and condemning the porous border control that allows a steady stream of illegal immigrants into America.

Washington -- PAT BUCHANAN, before he became rich and famous as a TV pundit, grew up in this town as a tough Irish kid who worked off his energies fighting cops and rival gangs.Hasn't changed much at 56.His bellicose level still high, Mr. Buchanan is the political equivalent of a saloon brawler. Every four years there's a melee and he leaps in the middle, fists flying, feet kicking.But Republicans cannot be pleased that the hell-raising, tart-tongued Mr. Buchanan has entered their 1996 sweepstakes that until now was a polite debating society.

Title: "Moon Marked and Touched by Sun"Editor: Sydne MahonePublisher: Theatre Communications GroupLength, price: 406 pages, $15.95 In the introduction to this first-ever anthology of scripts by contemporary black American women playwrights, editor Sydne Mahone contends that these writers are "on the edge, scrawling in the margins of today's mainstream theatre."This collection of works by 11 writers should make those margins a better-known place. And, the imagination and diversity represented by Mahone's selections leave no doubt that the margins can often be more interesting than the mainstream.

THERE WERE campus riots at Kent State and Berkeley, but Louisiana State University was a quiet Southern school of 20,000 where the most violent uprising was the roar from Tiger Stadium during football season. The prevailing campus attitude was that everyone had a right to say what he or she felt and to fight, non-violently of course, for what he or she believed in. We had peaceful walk-outs for longer dorm hours, sit-ins for the right of women students to wear pants rather than skirts to class, and candlelight vigils protesting the Vietnam War.Thus David Duke was tolerated.

LET'S GIVE DAVID DUKE a rest for a moment and consider the ravings of another prominent bigot.I'm not sure what his real name is but he is known to his many fans as Ice Cube.Mr. Cube is described by his publicists as a "rap artist." I'll take their word for it, although I think that's stretching the word "artist" a bit.His publicists also say that Mr. Ice Cube likes to use his music, if it can be called that, to make social statements.One of his recent social statements has to do with the strained relationship that exists between black customers and Korean merchants in Los Angeles.

Vienna. -- The cameras are rolling and the pens are scribbling, all because the --ing man who aspires to be chancellor of Austria, Joerg Haider, has at last moved onto his most popular subject.It's time to bash some foreigners."A Lebanese man convicted 50 times for breaking and entering and other offenses wasn't supposed to re-enter Austria until the year 2047," Mr. Haider says, "but he keeps coming back. There was a Bulgarian caught red-handed, and yet he still receives social benefits. . . . A Romanian who was convicted gets a computer and 40,000 Austrian schillings [about $3,600]

"Backlash: Race and the American Dream" was evidently made while David Duke, the Louisiana politician best known as a former leader of the Ku Klux Klan, still seemed to be a formidable figure in the 1992 presidential campaign. But even after the collapse of his candidacy, concern over his appeal lingers. So tonight's hourlong documentary on PBS at 10 p.m. is by no means out of date.Clips from speeches and interviews show that Mr. Duke has tidied up his prose since the days when he wore the sheet and peddled Nazi pamphlets.