GOP rebukes David Duke, but not his supporters

Just when I thought David Duke had gone the way of the Betamax, buggy whips and record stores, the former Ku Klux Klan leader, Republican politician and jailbird has re-emerged to haunt the new Republican-controlled Congress.

The new House Republican whip Steve Scalise of Louisiana apologized this past week for an “error in judgment” that led him to speak in 2002 to the European-American Unity and Rights Organization, a white nationalist group founded by Duke.

Scalise, a state legislator at that time, said he didn’t recall much about the event except that he spoke against a tax proposal and knew nothing of a Duke link. Had he known they were a bunch of Duke-related white supremacists, he says, he never would have appeared.

Kenny Knight, a neighbor of Scalise and a political adviser to Duke, complicated the story in two interviews. He confirmed Scalise’s appearance in a Washington Post interview, then partly backpedaled the next day, telling the New Orleans Times-Picayune that Scalise actually spoke to a local and unrelated civic group two hours before the Duke group’s event.

Did Scalise apologize for an appearance he never made? By then Speaker John Boehner and other House leaders had given Scalise a pass for his “error in judgment,” as Boehner put it, noting that the Louisiana lawmaker had apologized.

Still, the controversy raises a question: What does a Republican have to do to get elected in places like Louisiana, where David Duke’s conservatism sounds mainstream, as long as Duke’s name isn’t mentioned?

Scalise has a record of blasting Duke without condemning all of Dukes’ views. Stephanie Grace, with The Advocate of Baton Rouge, recalls him telling her he was “like David Duke without the baggage,” meaning he supported the same policy ideas but didn’t share the same feelings about minorities. Scalise took the same better-than-Duke pose in 1999 when he and Duke were considering a race for Congress. “Duke has proved that he can’t get elected,” Scalise told the Capitol Hill newspaper Roll Call.

Scalise isn’t alone in that approach. Since Duke ditched his Klan robes in the 1970s, tailored his rhetoric and switched from the Democrats to the Grand Old Party in 1988, mainstream Republicans have tried to lose Duke but not his voters.

Duke won a seat in the statehouse in 1989 and served until 1992, representing a district in the same area that Scalise now represents. In a 1990 Senate race, Duke got 44 percent of the statewide vote, including a majority of the white vote.

After similar repudiations from establishment Republicans in 1991, he lost the governor race but won 55 percent of the white vote. Since then he has spent much of his time finding new audiences in which to stoke racial, religious and immigration anxieties overseas. In 2003 he was sentenced and served time after pleading guilty to giling a false tax return.

Yet, as much as he is denounced by other Republicans, some have purchased his mailing lists and phone lists and, even if they do not seek his open endorsement, they would rather not have him openly campaigning against them.