It will be illuminating no matter what happens when New York City Democrats go to the polls Tuesday to decide on whom the party will put up for Congress in New York’s 8th Congressional District. That’s because the white supremacist David Duke has endorsed one of the contenders, City Councilman Charles Barron, against a state assemblyman, Hakeem Jeffries. It seems that Duke’s hatred of African Americans is not as strong as his hatred of Jews. So he is prepared to back Mr. Barron, even though he is black, because he hates Israel. The prospect that Mr. Barron will win has, according to the Daily News, left the city’s Democratic establishment “terrified.”

It’s unlikely Duke’s endorsement is going to help Mr. Barron, but neither is it terribly likely it is going to hurt him. We got a glimpse of this when the Robert Belfer professor at Harvard, Stephen Walt, won praise from Duke for his attacks on the so-called Israel lobby in Washington. “David Duke Claims To Be Vindicated by a Harvard Dean” is the way Duke’s demarche, reported by Eli Lake, was headlined in The New York Sun. Duke was praising an 83-page “working paper” by Mr. Walt and John Mearsheimer of Chicago University. The professors claimed a network of journalists, think tanks, lobbyists, and largely Jewish officials had seized the foreign policy debate and manipulated America to invade Iraq.

“A great step forward” is how David Duke described the Walt-Mearsheimer paper. “I have read about the report and read one summary already, and I am surprised how excellent it is,” the Louisianan said in a wire to the Sun. “It is quite satisfying to see a body in the premier American University essentially come out and validate every major point I have been making since even before the war even started.” The one-time Louisiana legislator added that “the task before us is to wrest control of America’s foreign policy and critical junctures of media from the Jewish extremist Neocons that seek to lead us into what they expectantly call World War IV.”

Messrs. Walt and Mearsheimer protested that they detested David Duke, but their protestations proved either hard to credit or beside the point, given the positions they took in their writings. Mr. Lake reported that the Palestine Liberation Organization mission to Washington was distributing their academic paper, which also was also being hailed by a senior member of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood. The David Duke endorsement didn’t seem to hurt Messrs. Walt and Mearsheimer. They sold their book denouncing the Israel lobby for an enormous advance. Mr. Walt went on to write a column for Foreign Policy magazine, and they’ve become famous. Whether Mr. Barron gets a chance to repeat the hat trick will be decided by the Democrats in the 8th Congressional District on Tuesday.