Word: duking
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...deftly adding education costs to his accounting of society's loss to blacks -- though these costs cover all children, rich or poor, white or black, who attend public schools -- Duke is expressing a resentment of the poor for daring to exist. During his more forthright racist days, he had eugenic solutions for the problem: tax deterrents to breeding by the lower class matched by incentives for the genetically superior. He has softened that to drug testing and mandatory instruction in contraception for all welfare recipients...
...Duke presents his campaign as a call for courage. Speaking a few days before the L.S.U. game, he told a Cajun crowd in Reserve, La., "What I say is just what you say to each other around the dining room table; but I'm the only politician who has the courage to say it in public." There is a rogue air of risk to his enterprise. Only those willing to risk obloquy will put his bumper stickers on their car, post his signs in their yard -- and so each such display becomes a kind of guerrilla statement. He revels...
Some see in this a pattern of demagogy of the sort Louisiana has specialized in from Huey Long's time to that of Edwin Edwards. But Huey Long did not claim, as Duke does, to be a serious author writing on the environment and other subjects -- even, once, a sex manual -- under various pseudonyms. Ben C. Toledano, one of the founders of modern Republicanism in Louisiana, sees nothing of Huey in Duke. "My family has lived in New Orleans for 265 years -- a long time for Americans, and I don't see anything Southern in Duke. You drop...
Lance Hill agrees. He is the director of the Louisiana Coalition Against Racism and Nazism, founded to oppose Duke. "His appeal can be reproduced wherever a white middle class is close to a black high-crime area. Duke practices what I think of as cocaine politics. Like cocaine, his appeal is easily transported, easily concealed and highly addictive." There are rumblings around the nation that show the spread has already begun. Though Lee Atwater was quick to dissociate the national party from Duke, many Republicans feel that opposition to affirmative action and set-asides is a stand too rewarding...
...Duke is right, in some measure, about his opponents' unwillingness to talk - about "his issues." Liberals have been rather cowardly about defending affirmative action. They allow caricatures of it to be attacked with impunity (even by blacks like Shelby Steele, a San Jose State University English professor) as a program for quotas, or for rewarding the unqualified rather than finding the qualified. A combination of conservative opportunism and liberal faintheartedness creates soft areas for Duke to exploit...