Word: duked
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...having won, Edwards will now have to govern a badly bruised and divided state. Virtually all of Duke's votes came from whites, while the black vote went for Edwards. Having won only as the lesser of evils, Edwards now owes it to all Louisianians to restore some standards of decency to his traumatized state...
Demagogues don't yell "nigger" or "Jew boy" anymore. They've learned better. Just as David Duke shed his Klansman's sheets and Nazi uniform for the well-groomed banality of a suburban stockbroker, he traded in his bigoted rhetoric for a slick new glossary of coded appeals to racial resentment, market tested over the past two decades by mainstream conservative politicians. When Duke, following Richard Nixon's lead, denounces hiring "quotas," many among his white working-class supporters hear him saying, The government is going to give your jobs to blacks. When Duke, like Ronald Reagan, castigates "welfare queens...
John Sununu, the White House chief of staff, observed in the course of denouncing Duke on the eve of last Saturday's election, "If he succeeds, it will be by appearing to run not as a racist." Yet the sad truth is that Duke has been exploiting a political style and strategy that Governors, Senators and Presidents have been using to win elections since 1968, the year Democrat George Wallace demonstrated that white populism, stripped of overtly racist language, could attract support outside the South...
Though some Democrats hope Duke will sully the G.O.P. as a racist party, Democrats must share the blame for Duke's success and the rising national appetite for Duke's scapegoating style. Leaders of both parties attribute Duke's appeal to rising unemployment, yet as Democratic strategist James Carville, a native of Louisiana, observes, it is Democrats who are held most responsible for "failing to define ourselves as we traditionally have, as the party that defends the interests of working people of all races...
...engage in crime and have babies they can't afford, while the legal secretary is scrimping and saving to afford another kid." These voters consider both parties to be controlled by wealthy campaign contributors but view the Democrats as also beholden to other "special interests," including blacks. Many of Duke's supporters "don't resent blacks as blacks," says a Republican pollster. "They resent them as a special-interest group that gets special favors...