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," nobody has to be told what color they are.
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.
Disguised race baiting persists in politics for a simple reason: it works. "Some of us would like to get beyond this business of scaring people and dividing them against blacks," says one of George Bush's closest political advisers, "but it's hard to argue against a formula that's seen as successful." The tactic has succeeded best in states and districts where the minority population is large enough that whites can be made to feel threatened by it. When George Brown ran for re-election as Tennessee's first black supreme court justice in 1980, he says he got more support from white hillbillies who had never met a black professional than he did from whites in the Nashville area, where, Brown says, "a lot of whites think they know about blacks."
Racial tactics can backfire if they are ill-timed or overly strident. Many white voters will abandon any candidate who they judge has crossed the line into blatant racism. Several top political aides, including the late Lee Atwater, counseled Bush to sign the civil rights bill passed by Congress last year, rather than make an issue of quotas so long before his next campaign. "Quotas are a legitimate issue," says one G.O.P. strategist, "but I thought it couldn't be sustained for 24 months without making a mistake. And ( when you make a mistake on this issue, it's a big mistake because it gets you labeled racist, and there's nothing more sensitive with our yuppie constituency."