Jesse Helms: please don’t overlook his lifetime of bigotry

But my reaction to this news:

Former US Republican Senator Jesse Helms – a leading conservative politician – has died aged 86, officials say.

He died early on Friday of natural causes in Raleigh, North Carolina, his former chief of staff said.

Mr Helms had served five terms in the Senate representing North Carolina before stepping down in 2003.

He was dubbed “Senator No” for blocking many policies he saw as contrary to his conservative view of the world.

Mr Helms was chairman of the influential Senate Foreign Relations Committee, becoming the first lawmaker to address the UN Security Council.

Mostly, he was known for his bigotry, including anti-gay bigotry

In 1993, when then-President Clinton sought confirmation for an openly homosexual assistant secretary at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, Helms registered his disgust. “I’m not going to put a lesbian in a position like that,” he said in a newspaper interview at the time. “If you want to call me a bigot, fine.”

as well as racial bigotry.

POLITICS OF SEGREGATION

The strategy that helped Republicans sweep to power last November is one that Jesse Helms perfected decades ago. “Jesse Helms understood before anyone else that the proverbial angry white male feels the most aggrieved, and is therefore the most likely to vote,” says Larry Sabato, a professor of government at the University of Virginia. “Jesse Helms was an angry white male before most of his compatriots were. He should have been lucky enough to be on the ballot in ‘94. He would have won easily.”

Unlike many of his Republican counterparts, Helms has changed little over the past 50 years. Long before Rush Limbaugh, Helms pioneered the use of television to rally public sentiment. While Ronald Reagan was losing primaries to Gerald Ford, Helms mobilized the religious right and built one of the most profitable political fundraising machines ever. And long after die-hard segregationists like George Wallace and Strom Thurmond began courting black voters, Helms fueled white fears by opposing a national holiday in honor of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., whistling “Dixie” while standing next to Senator Carol Moseley-Braun, and supporting apartheid in South Africa.

“His racial politics are deeply held convictions, not simply politics of convenience,” says Christopher Scott. “He has a view of a fundamentalist Christian society in which everyone is not welcome. If you could pick up the South Africa of 20 years ago and transplant it to America, that’s what he would do.”

Born in Monroe, N.C., in the fall of 1921, Helms grew up in a segregated world not unlike the one of apartheid. He dropped out of college to work full time as a reporter before discovering the two arenas that would shape his career: broadcasting and politics. He learned about radio as a Navy recruiter during World War II and stuck with the emerging medium as news director of a fledgling station in Raleigh. And he was an “unofficial” researcher for conservative Willis Smith, whose 1950 Senate campaign is still considered one of the meanest and most racially divisive in the country’s history. (One of Smith’s ads featured a doctored photo of the incumbent’s wife dancing with a black man. Helms has denied any involvement, but a newspaper advertising manager later told Helms biographer Ernest Furgurson that Helms personally cut up the photos.)

Of course, the press will overlook his lifetime of bigotry as they have in the past:

In his piece this week Broder made much of Helms’ divisive campaigns in 1984, against Gov. Jim Hunt, and 1990, against Charlotte mayor Harvey Gant, when the conservative Republican played the race card with jaw-dropping audacity.

Yet Broder watched those same races like everyone else in the political media, and wrote nothing condemning Helms’ race-baiting tactics. In 1987 he wrote a column about Hunt, revisiting his loss to Helms, but never detailed any of Helm’s racist maneuvers. (There was a passing reference by Broder in ‘94 to Helms and how “No one in current politics has played the race card more flagrantly than he has in his campaigns.”)

Since then, when Broder did write about Helms’ work in the Senate, it was usually to poke him gently about inside-the-Beltway questions of process (a Broder specialty): trying to pass a “nonsensical amendment” having to do with art funding, his staunch opposition to the United Nations, and his leading role in defeating the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.

Even when Helms for years held up President Clinton’s nomination of Roger Gregory to be the first African-American judge to the 4th Circuit bench in Helms’ North Carolina (a district that represents more minorities than any other in the country), Broder did not question Helms’ racial motivation.

Broder was right about the press treating Helms’ retirement announcement with kid gloves, overlooking some of the senator’s hateful rhetoric over the years.

For more, see this article.

Well, I won’t overlook the fact that this “person” was nothing more than an Imperial Wizard in a suit. I am just sad that he didn’t live long enough to see Obama elected President.