MANDEVILLE, La. -- Voters rejected him in all but one of his nine campaigns for public office. His own party has largely disowned him. And some 26 watery miles over Lake Pontchartrain from here, a federal grand jury in New Orleans is investigating him.

But on this recent afternoon, David Duke, the unrepentant one-time Ku Klux Klan leader, seems not to have a care in the world. Until, that is, the waitress brings him a plate of chicken teriyaki with brown rice.

"I'm supposed to get white," Duke tells her.

Of course he is.

Color colors everything for Duke, who has become even more outspoken about his views on white supremacy and racial separatism in recent years than when he first gained national attention in 1989 -- the year he was elected to the Louisiana House of Representatives.

He has run almost continually since then -- for governor, congressman, senator, even president -- failing every time but somehow still managing to matter.

Here in his home state, where voters will pick a governor this fall, Duke is not a candidate, but he is a factor. Initially shaping up as a ho-hum affair in which the incumbent, Republican Mike Foster, was expected to cruise to re-election, the race has turned into the kind of raucous spectator sport that Louisianians have come to expect of their elective politics.

Duke, it emerged last month from the grand jury investigating him, had sold Foster a list of his supporters for $150,000. While the purchase of lists is common in campaigns, this transaction, conducted secretly and at a price considerably higher than the market for such things, has raised suspicions over what was really for sale. The reigning assumption, which both deny, is that Foster was buying Duke's endorsement and agreement not to run for governor himself.

Foster has since been hounded by questions about his association with Duke: Why didn't he report the purchase on his campaign finance forms? Why was it done covertly through a third party? Why, now that the news is out, does he refuse to denounce Duke and what he represents?

Foster's approval rating has dropped since the revelations but only slightly: from 81 percent to 78 percent, according to one poll. Most of the drop-off has been among blacks, the poll showed.

An odd role

As for Duke, although he has had to file amended tax returns and pay additional taxes for failing to report all of the income from selling his list, the brouhaha may help rather than hurt his future, observers say.

"It shows that he's still a player," says Wayne Parent, a political scientist at Louisiana State University. "What David Duke cannot be is irrelevant."

Duke's role in state and national politics remains an odd one: He can't get elected, yet he won't go away. He sometimes does quite well. In a crowded field this spring, he managed to come in third, with 19 percent of the vote, in a special election to fill a congressional vacancy.

He is his own cottage industry, selling newsletters, speaking to any group that will have him and, since the end of last year, pushing his self-published autobiography, "My Awakening."

In mold of Jesse Jackson

Ironically, when he describes his role in public life, the comparison is to a black man: Duke sees himself as the Rev. Jesse Jackson for white Americans.

"I speak out for my cause the way he speaks out for his," Duke says.

But not all causes are equal, he adds. Every racial and ethnic group but what Duke calls European-Americans is allowed and even encouraged to promote and celebrate its culture and goals, he says.

"But if I push a European-American agenda, I'm evil," he says. "I'm politically incorrect."

It's more than that, his detractors say, pointing especially to Duke's book.

The 718-page, $30 volume -- which Duke says is in its second printing after selling out its first, 15,000-copy edition -- portrays blacks as lower in intelligence and higher in criminality than whites, Jews as a cabal controlling the government and the media for its own ends, and immigrants as an "alien invasion" further diluting the nation's white heritage. Duke calls for an Aryan nation in which white Americans have their own schools, neighborhoods and cities.

"We shall end the racial genocide of integration," he writes. "We shall work for the eventual establishment of a separate homeland for African Americans."

Observes Silas Lee, a New Orleans-based pollster, "He's put the sheets back on."

In the past, especially during campaigns, has sometimes distanced himself from the KKK and its white-supremacist philosophy.

Duke, 48, joined the Klan as a teen-ager and became its grand wizard in 1975. But by the time he was elected to the Louisiana House in 1989, as a Republican, he claimed to have moderated his views.

He took to the floor of the House to tell colleagues that he indeed had dabbled in "far-right politics" but no longer supported racial or religious discrimination, reported the Advocate, a newspaper in the state capital, Baton Rouge. His involvement with such extremist groups, Duke went on to say, was a youthful indiscretion.

As he continued to run for various offices -- governor, president and U.S. Senate -- Duke positioned himself as just another conservative, observers say.

Trying to blend in

"He tried to blend into the mainstream conservative movement," says Robert Namer, a radio station owner and talk-show host as well as a consultant to Foster, the governor. "He went into this persona, this fake persona, 'Oh, I don't hate blacks.'

"But then, a lot of his people thought he was a traitor, while the other side didn't believe he had really changed, so he ended up being nothing. So he then decided, after all these defeats, he had to go where he could sell himself, and now he's become more openly anti-Semitic, anti-black."

Duke denies that he is either. And yet, he will also suggest that the number of Jews killed in the Holocaust has been exaggerated, that Jews "shamelessly" use the genocide to create sympathy for their agenda and that Jewish officials should automatically be suspected of greater loyalty to Israel than to the United States.

"Any patriotic person would think that our government would work for our own country. You would expect our government would be led by people who put the interest of our country first," Duke says, pointing out lists of Jewish government officials in his book.

If the U.S. government is controlled by Jews, its inner cities have been taken over by blacks and other nonwhites, who have turned them into a veritable "Third World" of street crime, political corruption, decrepit housing and failed schools, Duke says.

"We don't have any massive white inner cities with high crime rates, do we?" he asks. "People create societies that reflect their inner nature. There are tremendous differences between blacks and whites. They're genetic, they're cultural, they won't simply go away.

"Monoracial societies are the most civilized societies," he says. "Go to the least diverse areas of this country, and those are the ones with the lowest crime rate. Go to South Central L.A., though, and see what you have."

Strange bedfellows

It is such talk that makes many uneasy about the governor doing business with Duke. "This puts mainstream Republicans in bed with David Duke," says Lee, the political pollster. "This doesn't help the image of the party."

Louisiana Republicans say they can't prevent Duke from allying himself with whatever party he chooses. Some have denounced him, repeatedly, and yet Duke is undeterred. And that, they say, is more because of the national media attention he generates than any influence in his home state.

"It's like when you go to the circus, and you want to see the fat lady or the sword swallower," Namer says. "He's a spectacle. He's a freak. He's a sideshow.

"He's a magnet to the media. The media, and I'm one of them, bring him back to life," he says. "If he doesn't get publicity, he doesn't sell his newsletters."

Rob Couhig, a Republican businessman and lawyer who ran unsuccessfully for Congress this spring -- as did Duke -- agrees.

"He's a loser. He's a nonissue here," says Couhig, who owns a minor-league baseball team in New Orleans. "He has a very small following. He only sticks around because of the attention he gets from a national perspective."

As indication of Duke's marginal role in state politics, some point out that no groundswell has formed against the popular Foster over his dealings with the former Klansman. So far, at least.

"But the jury is still out," LSU's Parent says. Literally -- the grand jury has not concluded its investigation. "The governor's race could be more interesting than we thought."

Duke, true to form, sees the investigation as politically and racially motivated. Eddie Jordan, the U.S. attorney for eastern Louisiana whose office is investigating Duke, is black, as is his friend U.S. Rep. William J. Jefferson, who is Foster's main competitor in the governor's race.

"Jordan's trying to help his buddy," Duke says. "I think there's a racial component."

Although the U.S. Department of Justice concluded that Jordan's friendship with Jefferson is not a conflict of interest, Jordan voluntarily removed himself from the probe this month.

Saying he wanted to remove any possible appearance of impropriety, Jordan said career prosecutors in his office would take over the case and report directly to the Justice Department. The grand jury has called Duke, but he has pleaded the Fifth Amendment and refused to testify.

Duke won't rule out another run for office, although that appears unlikely. "I think the American political system is very inequitable," he says. "We need more independent thinking, but we really have a two-party system. If they lock you out of a party, they lock you out of politics."

Whether or not he runs again, Duke says, he will continue to write and speak out. He is working on a second book. "How else do I get my story out?" he says. "How are we going to know the truth?"