Jesse Helms

Five-term Senator from North Carolina Jesse Helms died yesterday. You can't say anything bad about him now, so he is getting some positive obituaries.

But, I can. Generally, I think Democrats are being misguided conspiracy theorists when they talk about the racial undertones of the Republicans message. They want to claim the moral high ground, but any honest Democrat would see the same thing if they looked deeply at what Democratic candidates say (Or not too deeply at Hillary Clinton's comments). But, Jesse Helms is an exceptionm and by all evidence a genuinely nasty racist man. He started out a populist reactionary Democrat, but found he could be elected as a populist reactionary Republican. He promoted reactionary and thinly-veiled bigoted views throughout his many terms in the Senate.

For some reason, very election Jesse Helms ran as strictly opposed to affirmative action (See the famous ad at the bottom). He had made some explicit and very racist statements while a Democrat earlier in his career (Wikipedia provides a good enoguh overview). Unlike Robert Byrd, Al Gore, Strom Thurman (worse than Strom Thurman!) and many other old Southern Democrats I find no evidence of him distancing himself at all from his explicity racist history. And he acted a lot like we would expect a bigot to act in Congress. There were reasonable arguments to oppose making Martin Luther King's birthday a Holiday (King did have connections with some communists and his foreign policy views seem quite reactionary, but Washington and Lincoln had some serious issues themselves... I don't really like holidays dedicated to people, but that's for another blog post). However, I view Helm's opposition to the Holiday as more than coincidental. Helms was strictly opposed most of Israel's actions for mysterious reasons. He was also quite protectionist in his trade views. He seemed opposed to anything that dealt with people who were different than him.

Helms was a cold warrior in a sense, and he did support Ronald Reagan. Those aren't good enough reasons to fondly remember him. I'm an apologist for a lot of the things Goldwater and Reagan did and said, but not this guy. Good bye Jesse.