A historical sense can be a wonderful thing to have. Not long ago, for instance, someone reminded me that when Christianity was as old as Islam is now, the Inquisition was going full tilt. When Islam gets to be two thousand years old, he suggested, maybe it’ll be as guilt-ridden and effete as Christianity has become. I find that comforting, don’t you?

Last November I called on history to console a friend who’d recently moved to Baton Rouge and found himself dismayed by the gubernatorial contest between Edwin Edwards and David Duke. Having to choose between a candidate known as the “Silver Zipper” and another billed as a “Nazi for the 90’s” made him—well, uncomfortable. I pointed out that whoever won wouldn’t be the worst governor Louisiana ever had; in fact, he probably wouldn’t even be the worst governor in living memory. For some reason, that didn’t cheer him up.

Boy, was I wrong when I complained a couple of years ago in this magazine that Southern politics have become boring. I was wrong that they’ve become boring, and I was wrong to complain. I will stay after class and write 500 times: “Boring is not necessarily bad.”

What went awry in the land of dreamy dreams? Four or five years ago, James Moffett, head of the Louisiana Council for Fiscal Reform, was telling the “Wall Street Journal that “a modern era of politics is fixing to evolve” in his state. Yet here was a Baton Rouge Junior Leaguer saying in the Washington Post that she was going to vote for Duke because, unlike Edwards, he wouldn’t last more than four years in office and maybe somebody would shoot him sooner than that. She wasn’t the only Louisianan talking wistfully about the “.38 calibre recall” that took out Huey Long. How did matters get that out of hand?

The problem, of course, went back to the primary, when roughly two-thirds of the voters voted against each of the three major candidates. In each case the majority was right. When Buddy Roemer, the Democrat-turned- Republican incumbent flake, proved to be as inept at campaigning as at governing and came in third, he set up the Edwards-Duke contest.

Now, not even-National Public Radio tried to present that as a straight-up morality play. In bed with the oil and chemical companies, a gambler and womanizer, oft-indicted (though ne’er convicted), the former governor is an anachronism, a caricature of the sort of pol our nation’s newly puritanical press corps eats for lunch. Edwards, whose sense of humor is the best thing about him, told reporters he wasn’t going to talk about the Duke’s past “because he might talk about mine,” and there’s a lot there to talk about. Many Louisianans had simply never dreamed of voting for Edwards under any circumstances, and it apparently took them a while to realize that voting for the Wiz because you couldn’t abide the Cajun Prince would have been like taking a blowtorch to your case of athlete’s foot.

In some ways the national attention made it worse. The networks and newsmagazines, like the horrified Louisiana business community, were almost daring Louisianans to vote for David Duke, and that was a mistake. You don’t dare Southerners to do anything you don’t really want us to do. For every Louisianan who was embarrassed by what the readers of the New York Times were thinking, I’m sure another was tempted to vote for Duke just to show he wasn’t chicken.

Besides, Duke wasn’t exactly wrong on “the issues.” Most Louisianans agreed with him on those—at least those issues he talked about. So did lots of folks outside Louisiana (40 percent of Duke’s campaign funds came from out of state). For that matter, so did I. And so did many black Southerners, as the polls (and I) have been saying for some time, and as the Clarence Thomas hearings could have taught us, had we not been distracted by Anita Hill and the Atlanta Braves.

By the way, how about those Braves? They almost avenged the burning of Atlanta, didn’t they? Let the spoilsports from the American Indian Movement take their whining to that sanctuary for guilt-ridden liberals with a football team called the Redskins: down in Atlanta, even Jimmy Carter was doing the tomahawk chop. So was Hanoi Jane, although she came up with a more sensitive version, sort of a tomahawk pat. The Reverend Joseph Lowery of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference told ESPN that he could see the Native Americans’ point: after all, if the team was the Atlanta Negroes and all the fans waved little switchblades, he’d be annoyed. He undercut his argument, though, when he went on to say that folks wouldn’t like it if the team was the Atlanta Rednecks and fans waved little nooses. Maybe somebody would find that offensive, but not rednecks: I know guys who could really get into that.

Anyway, back to Louisiana. As I was saying, lots of black Southerners are every bit as conservative as David Duke was talking, on the issues he was talking about. It isn’t just whites who want welfare reform, and crime control, and lower taxes. But it’s remarkable that even four percent of Louisiana’s black voters could bring themselves to pull the lever for a former Grand Wizard, even one who says he now talks to Jesus every day.

A lot of white Louisianans weren’t ready to do it either. Newspapers all over the country got a chuckle out of the bumper stickers that said “Vote for the Crook: It’s Important,” but three out of five voters did just that. True, Duke got 55 percent of the white vote and no doubt we’ll be hearing that he lost because of black bloc-voting, but he would have had fewer white votes if blacks hadn’t turned out so strongly against him. Either (I) blacks vote their interests, or (2) white fear of black power is allayed. Whichever: Duke loses.

Basically, the numbers suggest that Edwards won because he picked up three-quarters of the Roemer voters, most of them conservative white Republicans, I’m sure—people who had to swallow hard to vote for Edwards, but did it, when the chips were down. Partly this was snobbery: country-club Republicans don’t want to be governed by a low-life rabble-rouser with a cheap nose job, a political Jimmy Swaggart. (True, political life forms don’t come much lower than Edwin Edwards, but at least he’s amusing.) Partly, the polls showed, it was also economic concern. Corruption is expensive, but the Edwards campaign argued that a Duke victory would be even more costly, making it harder to recruit everything from factories and tourists to players for the LSU football team. At the end, Duke was reduced to saying, in effect, “Would not.”

Surely even more important, though, was the recognition that some things are more important than “issues.” Things like—oh, for instance, sin. The American people have always known that, even if political junkies tend to forget it.

Yes, Jesus consorted with sinners, and he may even consort with David Duke. We have to believe that no one is beyond redemption, and maybe there are Baptists willing to take Duke’s word that he’s found it. Those of us from less forgiving traditions, though, would like more evidence than just some testifying.

Duke talked about his “youthful indiscretions,” and obviously he has learned discretion somewhere along the way, but that’s not the point. Some “indiscretions” call for more than regret, they call for penance—lots of it. Some of us think a repentant Nazi ought to be off working with lepers or something, not running for governor.

It looks as if that view is shared by a good many Louisianans. Enough of them, anyway.