
          It's Jesse Again
          By Gaillard, FryeFrye Gaillard
          Vol. 6, No. 6, 1984, pp. 1-3
          
          Relying on $14 million worth of accusation, racial invective and
unrepentant lying, Sen. Jesse Helms has been reelected.
          He defeated North_Carolina's popular governor, Jim Hunt, by
fifty-one percent to forty-nine percent of the vote. Thus, a state
once considered the South's most progressive has offered--once
again--a solid vote of confidence to one of the most radical spokesmen
for the American rightwing.
          For a time, it appeared the result would be different. Just over a
year ago; Helms was trailing badly in most opinion polls. But like
many a Southern politician with his back to the wall, he knew where to
turn. Even in a state where the two largest cities have elected black
mayors, and where one of them, Charlotte, has become a national model
for successful school integration, the issue of race still cuts to the
bone. So Helms seized upon the national debate over a holiday honoring
Dr. Martin_Luther_King, and he began to sound the themes of thirty
years ago.
          "I think," he declared on the floor of the Senate, "most Americans
would feel that the participation of Marxists in the planning and
direction of any movement taints that movement at the outset . . .
          "The fact is that Dr. King's program at least in part was conceived
and aided by men and women who were not loyal to the United_States. I
refer specifically to members of the Communist Party of the United
States, a revolutionary action organization funded and directed from
Moscow. Although there is no record that Dr. King himself ever joined
the Communist Party, he kept around him as his principal advisers and
associates certain individuals who were taking their orders from a
foreign power . . .
          "King's patterns of associations show that, at the least, he had no
strong objection to communism, that he appears to have welcomed
collaboration with Communists, and that 

he and his principal vehicle,
the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, were subject to
manipulation by Communists. The conclusion must be that Martin Luther
King Jr. was either an irresponsible individual, careless of his own
reputation . . ., or that he knowingly cooperated and sympathized with
subversive and totalitarian elements under the control of a hostile
foreign power."
          Those kinds of guilt by association echoes of the late Joe McCarthy
are vintage Jesse Helms. With heavy racial overtones, they have been
his style since his days as a radio commentator in the 1950's; and
unlike Strom Thurmond, George_Wallace and others in the South who have
toned down their rhetoric in response to what they perceived as
changing realities, Helms is convinced that the old ways work.
          He may be right. Following his posthumous assault on King, Helms
rushed from nearly twenty percentage points behind, to a point or two
ahead, in the public opinion polls. And from then until the voting on
November 6, the issue of race remained a conspicuous theme in his
campaign literature and fund-raising appeals.
          One letter sent out by Helm's National Congressional Club contained
the message: "Black Power Means Black Rule and Violent Social
Revolution. VOTE HELMS." And on the front page of a newsletter paid
for by the Helms for Senate Committee, there was a photo of Jim Hunt
and Jesse Jackson with a headline reading: "Hunt Urges More Minority
Registration."
          All of that is part of a remarkably consistent ideology that has
made Helms, in the words of one Republican strategist in North
Carolina, the "ideological point man" of the American right.
          Helms's position on the arms race is that America should win it. He
opposes any form of arms control negotiations, l and his rhetoric
concerning the Soviet Union makes Ronald Reagan's seem mild. When the
Soviets shot down Korean Airlines Flight 007, Helms declared, "If that
is not an act of war, it will do until another comes along."
          He criticized the State Department and the Reagan Administration
for their support of El Salvador's President Duarte, charging that
Duarte is a "Socialist." He compares Roberto D'Aubisson's ARENA party
to local Chambers of Commerce in North_Carolina, and he declared at a
June press conference in Charlotte:
          "I met D'Aubisson down in Hot Springs, Virginia, last September,
and he didn't strike me as the kind of fella who would be connected
with death squads. So I went to all the intelligence agencies in town
and said, 'Tell me about the death squads.' They don't have any
evidence. There is no evidence. If the ARENA party were in North
Carolina, it would include most, if not all, of the free enterprise
folks in the city of Charlotte . . ."
          The thing that sets Jesse Helms apart, however, is not only his
willingness to say such things, but the way he delivers his lines. He
has that impressive gift of timing, that rare politician's ability to
size up an audience, to tap into the darker moods of alienation and
anger through a single word or phrase, delivered in most cases with a
derisive little smile: "Ted Kennedy . . ." He will say. Or "Jesse
Jackson . . ." That's all it takes, and the sudden rumbles of laughter
quickly grow into cheers, as Helms launches his assault on the
standard set of enemies: big-spending liberals, domestic radicals,
communist expansionists in every part of the world.
          There is a sarcasm and pugnacity that plays well in the South, that
appeals to bitter stirrings from thirty years ago, when the region
began to bear the frontal assaults of change.
          Kathryn Fulton, editor of the North_Carolina
Inde-pendent, argues that among the complicated
ingredients in Jesse Helms's appeal are his small town origins-a
conception of himself and America shaped by his growing up in the town
of Monroe, segregated, poor and pious, with the Depression and the
triumph of World_War_II defining people's thoughts on the way things
should be. In that idealized world, which seems so threatened by the
cataclysmic events of the last thirty years, there is no room for
ambiguity or doubt, for troubling complexity or disturbing shades of
gray.
          Helms stands, in effect, as a beacon of certainty and a symbol of
rage--lashing out at all the demons, the liberals, socialists,
communists, feminists, atheists and integrationists, who have made our
society such a disconcerting place.
          And if on some level his supporters are troubled by the meanness
and the Iying that are Helm's standard fare, they are seduced
nevertheless by the promise of victory: Total Victory over adversaries
unambiguously threatening.
          It is a powerful appeal.
          Arrayed against it, however, was very potent candidacy of Governor
Jim Hunt, who comes from the other side of Southern politics, from
another whole strain in the psyche of his state.  The strain is
enbodied in a sporadic history of progressive politicians, of whom
Frank Porter Graham in the 1940s and Terry Sanford in the 1960s were
perhaps the most important. Both insisted on the moral necessity of
change, and both appealed to the basic decency of North
Carolinians.
          Jim Hunt is a product of that tradition. He was raised on a farm in
the eastern part of the state--109 acres of tobacco fields and rolling
pastureland dotted with milk cows. His mother and father were ardent
admirers of Franklin D. Roosevelt, as they battled their way through
the vagaries of the Depression and learned to appreciate the helping
hand of government. A federal conservation grant paid for the pond on
their farm; their pine seedlings came from a federal project to combat
soil erosion; and Rock Ridge High School, where Mrs. Hunt was a
teacher, was rebuilt by the WPA after it burned to the ground.
          The Hunts were staunch believers in the racial moderation of Frank
Porter Graham, and they wept in 1950 when he lost a Senate
race--defeated by the racist demagoguery of a Jesse Helms mentor,
Willis Smith. Jim Hunt has never rebelled against the political legacy
of his parents.
          He is a politician who believes in the goodness of government, and
he proved to be an effective and very popular governor.
          He pushed for better roads and schools, the allocation of more
money for social programs; and his most recent achievement was a
$300-million educational package, including a fifteen percent pay
raise for every teacher in North_Carolina.
          The difficulty for Governor Hunt (as for any North Carolinian of
good conscience), lay in the degree to which Jesse Helms has been able
to push the state's politics to the right--setting the agenda and
defining the issues. Add to this the fact that Jim Hunt has always
been a cautious politician, sometimes cautious to excess.
          For the last two years of his governorship Hunt became extremely
protective of his right flank. He failed to speak and act as
unequivocally as many of his supporters would have liked on social
issues. He presided over two executions. And, as he began to address
issues in the senate race, Hunt positioned himself as far to the right
as he could--basically endorsing the Reagan Administration's support
for the contras in Nicaragua, and Administration's plans to build the
MX missile and the B-1 bomber.
          Each of these moves by Hunt, while perhaps stategically defensible
in terms of appealing to the broadest spectrum of North_Carolina
voters, helped to undermine the energy and enthusiasm of some of his
once-ardent supporters. Many other voters began to lose their clear
sense of just what Jim Hunt--and the best of the state's historical
Democratic legacy--stood for. With tragic irony, it was Hunt, not
Helms, who began to appear as the less-principled politician.
          All the caution worked to Hunt's disadvantage. As things turned
out, it hardly mattered what the Governor's publicly stated advocacies
were. Helms had $14 million to buy TV time to distort them.
          Through an assault of television commercials, Helms managed to
convince a majority of North Carolinians of something demonstrably
untrue: that Hunt was a big-spending liberal--a Mondale clone who, if
elected would raise their federal taxes by the remarkably specific sum
of $157 a month.
          In many of his commercials, Helms simply lied, putting a dollar
figure that he knew was midleading on tax proposals that were not even
Hunt's. He also lied, flatly and with no hint of shame, about the
details of his own record. "I haven't proposed to do away with social
security," the senator said, though in fact, he had proposed replacing
Social Security with a privately managed system. In a television
debate, he accused Hunt of favoring elimination of tax deductions on
home mortgage loans, which turned out to be a compound lie. Not only
had Hunt never advocated such a plan, Helms had.
          Later, Helms denied introducing anti-abortion legislation that
would also have precluded certain forms of contraception, when in
fact, that was precisely what he had done.
          Astonishly enough, the lying prevailed and Helms was elected.
          
            Frye Gaillard is an editorial page writer for the
Charlotte Observer.
          
        
