Senator Jesse Helms, RIP

This is hardly breaking news since Helms passed away on the 4th of July.

I read Helms' autobiography when it first came out in the fall of 2005. It is a rollicking good read, one of the most enjoyable of its kind that I have ever come across. Helms was one of the most savvy politicians of the 20th century. He had to be to remain in the Senate for 30 years. He was savagely opposed every time he ran for office, from the election of '72 to his final run in '96. One of my favorite quotes in the book: "All 5 times that we won, we surprised the mainstream media."

Helms certainly didn't win his way into office on a sexy image or mellifluous voice, because he possessed neither. He did decide in his first few days in the Senate that if he was going to be effective, he had to master the rules. And he did just that, to great effect, something that any Senator elected in the last 20 years clearly has not achieved, with perhaps the exception of Mitch McConnell.

Jesse Helms earned the hatred of the left for being proudly vocal about what he believed. He was tarred as a racist, which is supposed to be a conservative death warrant, but didn't work in Helms' case. (I Youtubed the ostensibly infamous "Hands" ad that Helms used in his 1990 race. I couldn't find anything racist about it; I guess because it protests the use of affirmative action in hiring practices, that that is something you're just not "allowed" to speak out about?)

As William Rusher points out, you could make a solid case that we have Helms to thank for the Reagan Presidency. Helms delivered the North Carolina primary to Reagan in 1976 when he had been declared dead as a Presidential candidate in his contest to unseat sitting President Gerald Ford. Reagan went on to come within a whisper of pulling of that upset, and consequently, was the frontrunner in 1980.

The media hated Helms, but Hubert Humphrey and Joe Biden, principled liberals both, were good friends of Jesse Helms and they weren't the only ones.

Read the book; you'll enjoy it. (Titled Here's Where I Stand: A Memoir.)