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I can’t find actual comparative funding sources for Jesse Helm’s career, but searching does talk about both direct mail and tobacco. Still, “has tons of money and runs negative scorched earth campaigns, never tops 53% of the vote” is right.
So? Do you automatically agree with them? I rather doubt tobacco employees and employers have similar opinions on unions, for example.
I don’t agree with them, but I always figure someone at work must.
Jesse Helms definitely always ran extremely rough and negative campaigns fueled by tons of money from his nationwide direct mail fundraising prowess that pretty much always kept his opponents on the defensive. He fought to win and regularly beat challengers who had big poll leads over him but weren’t tough enough for the type of campaign he came at them with. He overcame something like a 20 point deficit in 1984 to beat Jim Hunt in by far the most expensive Senate race ever to that point. He was down to Harvey Gantt by around 10 points in 1990 a month before the election. He won by small margins because he was hard right and never softened his positions in any way during his elections to try some kind of phony move to the center. In fact, he regularly used as a campaign slogan “You may not agree with me, but you always know where I stand.”
There are many reasons to complain about Helms, but saying he had too much campaign cash is dumb. I also think the 1950 tv ad is pretty dumb. Dredging up pre civil rights stuff to brand politicians is too far.
Better to judge Helms on the fact that he never real changed his pre-1960s views on Civil Rights. I can respect him for some of his foreign policy views but i have disdain for a man that continued to represent the worst elements of the South. It’s also embarrassing that too many conservatives have praised him unflinchingly without at least noticing his horrific problems with race
How about his treatment of the first black female senator?
Soon after the Senate vote on the Confederate flag insignia, Sen. Jesse Helms (R.-N.C.) ran into [African-American Illinois Senator Carol] Mosely-Braun in a Capitol elevator. Helms turned to his friend, Sen. Orrin Hatch (R.-Utah), and said, “Watch me make her cry. I’m going to make her cry. I’m going to sing ‘Dixie’ until she cries.” He then proceeded to sing the song about “the good life” during slavery to Mosely-Braun.
God help us all if Al Sharpton somehow gets into the Senate and camps there for a few decades.
God help us all if Sharpton somehow gets into Congress and camps there for a few decades.
You are missing the whole point. It doesn’t matter how odious, ineffective, and racist Sharpton would be, what is important, is how much he would piss off the Right.
Didn’t Fooey already explain this?
At least he would be amusing.
The would-be H.L. Mencken of our time Hitchens, fresh from a dunking, pays his respects.
To die on the Fourth of July, one can perhaps be forgiven for feeling, is or ought to be a privilege reserved for men of the stamp of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, both of whom expired on that day in 1826, 50 years after the promulgation of the declaration. One doesn’t want the occasion sullied by the obsequies for a senile racist buffoon.
The way to mark Helms’ passing is to recognize that he prolonged the life of the old segregated South and the Dixiecrat ascendancy and that in his own person, not unlike Strom Thurmond, he personified much of its absurdity and redundancy.
If that’s true, it just goes to show you how out of touch he was with not only the average American (even from the south) but with morality and decency.
I’d like to ask him how hot it is where he’s at right now, but I don’t believe in hell. (Although sometimes I wish it existed for folks like him)
I am in NC this week. Coming from a liberal town like Seattle, it’s a little weird to see all the positive Jesse Helms coverage on TV. You expect to see munchkins gleefully dancing on a yellow brick road, but you get teary eyed gentlemen speaking softly.
Some of us are dancing with glee.
If it’s not on the TV, it didn’t happen. :)
This post, unintentionally IMO, provides a lot of insight into the conservative psyche.
A couple more interesting bits. First, Helms as useless divider on policy, coalition building, and solving problems.
Well, some Helms revisionism is in order, all right, but not in the way that Barnes and company believe. It is true that Helms was stubborn and frank, as his admirers say, and also politically mean and demagogic, as his detractors retort. But his legacy was not to have given energy and direction to the modern conservative movement (Reagan and Barry Goldwater did that), or to have lowered the tone of modern politics (attack politics was coming anyway). His legacy was to debase and discredit American conservatism.
The contrast with Reagan is instructive. Both were conservatives who stood firm against received opinion. But Reagan changed that opinion, whereas Helms deepened it. Reagan believed that markets generally work better than government, that security comes from strength, that high taxes are unjust and self-defeating, that inflation could be licked with tight money, and that resolve and firmness could win the Cold War.
Today, many people, even many who in 1980 thought Reagan was scary, believe that he was partly or wholly right. He had a point, in other words, and he won it. Helms, by contrast, did not have a point and did not win it. He had many points, and he lost most of them.
[SIZE=5]T[/SIZE]he point is not that Helms was often wrong but how he was wrong. He is often referred to—admiringly, so far as many conservatives are concerned—as “Senator No.” Better would be “Senator Zero,” as in “zero-sum.”
Reagan made conservatism credible by showing that it could solve problems. It could make headway against inflation, against economic entropy, against communism, even against “malaise.” He believed that dynamic change, kindled by the prodigious energies of entrepreneurs and ordinary people, would produce win-win outcomes: a country that was stronger and also more genuinely compassionate, richer but also fairer.
Then there is Helms. In his world, if homosexuals win, heterosexuals lose. If blacks win, whites lose. In his 1990 Senate race, against a black opponent, he aired a famous—now infamous—television ad in which two white hands crumpled a letter while a voice-over intoned, “You needed that job, and you were the best qualified. But they had to give it to a minority because of a racial quota. Is that really fair?” Democrats accused him of race-baiting. In fact, affirmative action is a problematic policy that in some cases does discriminate against whites and that its supporters should be called upon to defend. The trouble with the ad, rather, was that it strengthened rather than weakened racial preferences by presenting a false, zero-sum choice: Blacks (or whites) win, so whites (or blacks) must lose. It implied that you could vote for the interests of blacks or the interests of whites, but you had to choose.
Secondally, why he was a dick, unlike, say, Goldwater:
I don’t think this dismissal covers all “conservatives” who made the wrong choice in the 60s. Barry Goldwater’s resistance to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was stupid, but he wasn’t a racist. Goldwater also supported the Arizona NAACP, desegregated the state’s National Guard and supported a ban on the poll tax. Which makes the embrace of Helms, to me, all the more galling. I think civilized, good-hearted, intelligent people often disagree on, say, the role of the military in the world, the best way for a country to provide health care, the most prudent tax policy. Reasonable, good-hearted people can even debate the merits of hot-button issues like Affirmative Action, which we’ve done on this very blog. But reasonable good-hearted people don’t do what Helms attempted to do Carol Moseley Braun. Vile bigots do that. And people who embrace vile bigots as their champions should expect to have thier motives doubted by people like me.