Louisiana The No-Win Election

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But as the days passed, the tide slowly began to turn. First, Roemer grudgingly endorsed Edwards and urged his sullen supporters not to sit out the election. Then, in a televised debate, Duke was confounded by an emotional question about bigotry. "I am scared, sir," began black TV reporter Norman Robinson. "I've heard you say that Jews deserve to be in the ash bin of history. I've heard you say that horses contributed more to the building of America than blacks did." Robinson went on to ask why any minorities should entrust their lives to Duke -- and the moral opposition to Duke's hate- mongering past coalesced.

Then Duke hit another stumbling block. Having claimed to be born again, he was asked where he worshiped and named a church no one had seen him attend. A top campaign aide, who doubted Duke's Christianity and called him "a racist, coward, draft dodger and bald-faced liar," deserted him a few days before the election.

And finally, the magnitude of the choice facing Louisiana started to settle in, especially among New Orleans' professional class. Experts predicted that dozens of conventions worth nearly $100 million would be canceled. University of New Orleans economist Timothy Ryan put the losses at about $1.8 billion and 45,000 jobs. "Louisiana," warned James Moffett, chairman of Freeport- McMoRan, the state's second largest public company, "wouldn't just be redlined by businesses around the nation and the world, we'd be X-rated."

The anti-Duke coalition was one of the most bizarre in modern American politics. Churches, environmentalists and liberal activists joined with the Establishment to fight Duke. Former Republican Governor David Treen endorsed Edwards, who once joked that Treen was so slow it took him an hour and a half to watch 60 Minutes. Even President Bush made an 11th-hour endorsement, fearful of what a Duke victory would mean for his party's efforts to woo black voters.

But 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.