litical figure. A native of Louisiana, David Duke has been a considerably active politician. As Duke introduces a broad political campaign he does not leave behind his ties to bigotry. Still affiliated with white supremacist groups Duke has been "convicted of inciting to riot.." ("Lousisiana's... 27). His history has linked him to a variety of neo-nazi organizations. "As a member of the KKK at Louisiana State University, where he received his BA in history in 1974, he became an enthusiastic admirer of Adolph Hitler, and by 1975, he had risen to grand wizard of the Louisiana Ku Klux Klan" (Mackenzie, 40). Duke was always searching for a different approach to express his ideas. Methods of the Klan were no longer effective in stopping civil rights as they were in the sixties (Mackenzie,40). "Duke quit the Klan in 1980, and founded the National Association for the Advancement of White People" (Mackenzie,40). Duke broke into the national spotlight in 1987, when he was elected to the Louisiana House of Representatives, from the district of Jefferson Parish. While serving his term as a state legislator, "he was caught selling Nazi books from his legislative office. One of them, "Did Six Million Really Die?" attempts to discredit the Holocaust" (Turque 53).Duke then made an attempt to unseat J. Bennett Johnston from his position in the United States Senate in 1990. He gave Johnston quite a scare, forcing a run off election and receiving almost forty percent of the vote in that election. Encouraged by that performance, Duke gave up his House seat to run for governor. Even though his strategy was hardly original, he managed to rally an entire campaign around the folklore that welfare spending was responsible for high taxes and blacks were taking away jobs from whites. Yet, in reality, the total outlay on aid to families with dependent children amounted to less than two percent of the entire state budget. He received thirty-two percent of the prim...
