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Polling and focus-group studies by both parties show that working-class voters increasingly believe the system is loaded in favor of the rich and the poor, at the expense of the middle. "They see that the top of America and the bottom don't operate by the same rules as the rest of us," says Elaine Kamarck, senior fellow at the Progressive Policy Institute in Washington. "The big executives run companies into the ground and give themselves big bonuses. The welfare recipients take drugs, 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."
Democrats also must share with Republicans the responsibility for the barrenness of political debate in which Duke has thrived. When the subject is welfare, for example, few leaders of either party point out that the major programs for the poor constitute about 6% of federal spending -- far less than the value of corporate tax breaks and other welfare for the wealthy. "You can't write off Duke's voters as racists," says Tony Snow, the chief White House speechwriter. "Duke is talking about things people really care about: high taxes, crummy schools, crime-ridden streets, welfare dependency, equal opportunity. A lot of politicians aren't talking about these things."
Harris Wofford, the liberal Democrat who upset former Attorney General Dick Thornburgh for a Senate seat from Pennsylvania two weeks ago, understood the impatience of working-class voters with Democrats who talk more about the agendas of gay and feminist activists than about lunch-box economic issues. Wofford avoided that mistake by talking mostly about jobs and health insurance. Fred Steeper, a Republican pollster who surveyed Louisiana voters before the recent primary vote, observes that "Duke is tapping into the same middle-class frustration as Wofford" -- but in a far more destructive way.
Duke ran for President (on the Populist Party ticket) in 1988 and may well do so in 1992 (as a Republican). And although most of Bush's political advisers see little threat to the President's re-election from the ex- Klansman, some fear he could peel away Republican votes as a third-party candidate in the general election, as Wallace did to the Democrats in 1968 and 1972. If Duke runs, he will surely attack Bush for signing a civil rights bill little different from the one he vetoed as a "quota bill" in 1990.
Bush believes his racial attitudes are above reproach because of the support he has given the United Negro College Fund since he was a Yale undergraduate in the 1940s and because he has reached out widely to black leaders and spoken at black colleges. At the same time, critics observe, Bush opposed the 1964 Civil Rights Act. During his 1988 campaign, Bush almost never went into black neighborhoods to ask for votes. And his campaign relied heavily on TV spots focusing on Willie Horton, a black murderer who raped a white woman while on furlough from a Massachusetts prison.