If there's been one satisfying development in the dreary race to choose ¶¶Ņõh's new United States senator, it's the extent to which the most famous of the two dozen candidates on next week's primary ballot, David Duke, has been marginalized.
Duke's been around, of course, busily tweeting out white supremacist and anti-Semitic screeds and issuing occasional robocalls suggesting that he's running as a ticket with GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump, who took his own sweet time but eventually renounced the former Ku Klux Klan leader, half-term lawmaker, 1991 gubernatorial runoff contestant and convicted con man. But overall, he's mostly been easy to ignore.
Well, it was nice while it lasted.
While lesser-known candidates who've been campaigning in good faith have been starved of attention and exposure, Duke's lingering notoriety itself seems to have landed him a coveted spot in this week's second and final televised alongside his five leading opponents. Raycom Media, the debate's sponsor, decided to invite any candidate who scored above 5 percent in a poll it commissioned. Duke eked his way in with 5.1 percent, well behind state Treasurer John Kennedy with 24.2 percent, Public Service Commissioner Foster Campbell with 18.9 percent, lawyer Caroline Fayard with 12 percent, U.S. Rep. Charles Boustany with 11.4 percent and fellow U.S. Rep. John Fleming with 10.2 percent. No other recent public poll has shown Duke doing that well.
John Kennedy and Foster Campbell lead the field in the race to qualify for the U.S. Senate r…
Duke's inclusion has already emerged as a headline of theĀ debate, and his presence on stage, particularly a stage located on the campus of historically black Dillard University in New Orleans, will probably help boost ratings and perhaps even attract embarrassing out-of-state notice. It's not like anyone else in the race has set the world on fire.
But the numbers are the numbers, and despite the awkwardness and Duke's immediate claim that he fears for his safety, Dillard officials have pledged to take the high road and work with local partner WVUE "to ensure that the event is secure and managed professionally as it does with every event that occurs on our campus."
Democrat Caroline Fayard no longer has the backing of the Alliance for Good Government in th…
Duke re-emerged in an even more unfortunate context last week when Fayard, who trails fellow Democrat Campbell in pretty much every poll, started airing an ugly and misleading ad linking the two men.
The commercial features a brief audio snippet of Campbell saying he's "like" Duke, and a narrator claiming that Campbell had "sided" with Duke at an Alliance for Good Government forum over the summer. Even based on a brief transcript posted on Fayard's website, it was clear Campbell was simply referring to how Duke phrased his answer to a question, not anything meaningful or substantive he'd said. I attended the forum and can personally attest that Campbell's unfortunate choice of words came off as just that. Certainly people in the room didn't act surprised or alarmed, as they surely would have if a candidate trying to earn votes from African-American Democrats had expressed any actual agreement or affinity.
Asked at a U.S. Senate candidate forum last summer to name two federal programs he'd elimina…
The ad speaks to Fayard's desperation to knock Campbell down by any means possible, fair or not. But it also reconfirms Duke's continued symbolic resonance, even a quarter century after he last posed a credible electoral threat.
That's why , both Democrats and his fellow Republicans, have not only rushed to renounce him but have played up their disapproval, which they clearly believe makes them look good.
It's why the national press and Democrat Hillary Clinton's campaign have made much of Duke's attempt to ride Trump's coattails, and of to disavow his support.
David Duke, the former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard, avowed white nationalist and half-term sta…
It's why a bipartisan group that fought Duke's ascent back in the early 1990s reconvened this year, under the leadership of retired Tulane historian Larry Powell, who noted that Duke has a history of under-polling and said he sees worrisome similarities between the conditions that led to Duke's initial rise and those in place now.
Duke is a fringe player, but sadly, his name still packs a punch.
And that won't change until voters in the state that launched him make it clear, once and for all, that it doesn't.