About time............... Sen. Jesse Helms, R- N.C. is expected to say Wednesday he won't run for another term.
Helms set to opt out of Senate race
North Carolina conservative reportedly will announce his retirement Wednesday
By Tom Curry
MSNBC
Aug. 21 — Sen. Jesse Helms, an indefatigable critic of abortion, homosexuality and communism, is expected to announce Wednesday that he will not run for a sixth term, sources in North Carolina told NBC News Tuesday. A leader of American conservatism for four decades, the Republican has been a master of obstruction, leading the opposition to anything or anyone he perceived as liberal.
Helms built a reputation as master of obstruction, leading the opposition to nearly every major treaty and blocking appointments by presidents from Ronald Reagan to Bill Clinton.
HELMS HAS ALWAYS delighted in outraging liberal Democrats, feminists and gay rights activists. As the man they loved to hate, Helms may have done as much for their fund-raising efforts as for his own.
Rumors of his impending retirement had been floating for months. Helms underwent heart bypass surgery several years ago and has been forced by a nerve disease to use a motorized scooter to travel around the Capitol building.
If, as expected, Helms does announce his retirement, Republicans may turn to former Labor Secretary and GOP presidential contender Elizabeth Dole, who was born and raised in North Carolina.
But other Republicans such as Rep. Richard Burr and former Charlotte Mayor Richard Vinroot may jump into the Senate race, too.
North Carolina Secretary of State Elaine Marshall is seen as a leading Democratic contender. Although President Bush carried the state in last November’s election, North Carolina has a Democratic governor, Mike Easley, and a Democratic senator, John Edwards.
MASTER OF OBSTRUCTION
In his 28 years in the Senate, Helms has built a reputation as master of obstruction, leading the fight against a chemical weapons treaty, the Panama Canal Treaty and executive and judicial appointments by both Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.
Last June, conservative Wall Street Journal columnist Paul Gigot assailed Helms for “holding no fewer than four (Bush) Treasury nominees hostage until he’s allowed to single-handedly rewrite last year’s Africa-Caribbean free-trade bill.”
Helms earned the moniker “Senator No” by objecting to much of what presidents and other members of Congress wanted to do. A tireless opponent of the United Nations, Helms took the unprecedented step last year of leading a Senate delegation to the United Nations, where he addressed the Security Council.
Americans, he said, “see the U.N. aspiring to establish itself as the central authority of a new international order of global laws and global governance. This is an international order the American people will not countenance.”
He warned the Security Council that “the American people will never accept the claims of the United Nations to be the ‘sole source of legitimacy on the use of force’ in the world.”
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He rejected U.N. efforts to set up an International Criminal Court that might have jurisdiction over U.S. soldiers accused of war crimes. “How can the nations of the world imagine for one instant that Americans will stand by and allow such a power-grab to take place?” Helms asked.
Few members of Congress have had a deeper loathing of Cuban dictator Fidel Castro than Helms.
In 1996, after Castro’s fighter planes shot down a Brothers to the Rescue Cuban émigré plane, Helms pushed through the Senate the Helms-Burton Act, tightening the U.S. embargo against Cuba and allowing lawsuits to be filed in federal court against foreign firms investing in confiscated property in Cuba.
PROTESTING ELIAN’S RETURN
When the Clinton administration moved in the summer of 2000 to return Elian Gonzalez, the son of a woman who died fleeing the island, Helms declared, “It is bitterly ironic that the Clinton administration is rushing to send Elian Gonzalez back to a country that has just been singled out by the United Nations for its systematic violations of human rights. Sending that young boy back to Castro’s tropical gulag cuts the heart out of our political asylum laws.”
But Helms’ doctrinaire conservatism did not stop him from making strange-bedfellow, strategic alliances when it suited his goals.
Last year, for example, Helms worked in tandem with Green Party leader Ralph Nader and left-wing Democrats such as Sen. Paul Wellstone of Minnesota to try to defeat a bill to grant preferential trade status to China.
Helms asked skeptically if the bill would “persuade (China’s) rulers to retreat from their threats to invade Taiwan if Taiwan does not negotiate reunification with the Communist mainland? Will China all of a sudden cease its relentless military buildup in the Taiwan Strait?”
ATTACKING ART SUBSIDIES
When anti-Communism began losing some of its potency as an issue in 1990, Helms discovered new causes — homosexuals, the spreads of AIDS and taxpayer subsidies for sexually explicit art through the National Endowment for the Arts.
Helms called for quarantining people with AIDS and denounced homosexuals, calling their sexual behavior “incredibly offensive and revolting.” He referred to AIDS prevention programs in schools and federal offices as “thinly veiled attempts to restructure values of American families in favor of the homosexual lifestyle.”
Ahead of other politicians, Helms saw the populist appeal of attacking the NEA. Helms was saying in 1990 what Newt Gingrich and other Republicans would say four years later: Taxpayers should have a right to decide what kind of art their tax dollars should be used to subsidize.
In his 1990 Senate campaign, Helms showed up at a North Carolina school gymnasium to rail against the NEA’s use of taxpayer money and to show his constituents a portfolio full of homoerotic nude photos by Robert Mapplethorpe.
“Come up here and see what your tax dollars are paying for,” Helms invited the crowd. “But no ladies, please! Only men can come up and see this. This will turn your stomach. My assistant has the photos over there.” Helms gestured to a young aide, who guarded the photos, which had been displayed in a NEA-subsidized show.
The photos were designed partly to appeal to a male homosexual audience, so it was oddly fitting that Helms restricted viewing privileges to the men in the audience, although Helms did not seem aware of the irony.
As his biographer Ernest Furgurson detailed, Helms was often ahead of other politicians in using innovative campaign techniques:
Starting in 1946, Helms worked as a “you-are-there” reporter for radio stations in North Carolina. He recognized the immediacy of radio and the power of the sound-bite. He graduated to doing commentary for television station WRAL in Raleigh, establishing the name recognition that helped him win his Senate seat in 1972. There have been broadcasters-turned-politicos since then, but Helms was the pioneer.
Helms built an empire of direct-mail operations and political action committees that was a precursor of Newt Gingrich’s network of fund-raising groups in the 1990s.
In his 1984 Senate re-election bid, Helms worked with a young Baptist minister named Lamarr Mooneyham to register conservative Christians who may have provided his winning margin.
The effort was a blueprint for Christian Coalition voter registration and education drives in the 1990’s, which led to religious conservatives becoming a permanent part of the GOP base and helped George Bush win the White House in the 2000 election.
He was also a throwback to the race-baiting politics of the old South.
Helms filibustered for a month to stall passage of a bill establishing a holiday to honor Martin Luther King, calling the civil rights leader a Marxist and telling his colleagues that “the legacy of Dr. King was really division, not love.”
EXPLOITING RACE FEARS
In his 1990 Senate re-election campaign, Helms’s attacked his Democratic opponent, former Charlotte mayor Harvey Gantt, who is black, suggesting that he supported racial quotas in hiring, which Gantt did not.
Helms also made life miserable for leaders of his own party.
In 1974, after Nobel-prize winning novelist Alexander Solzhenitsyn left the Soviet Union and came to the United States, President Gerald Ford wouldn’t allow him to visit the White House.
Helms took to Senate floor to declare that “this country has come to a sad impasse when the president of the United States of America must tremble in timidity and refuse to see a man dedicated to freedom.”
Two years after the Solzhenitsyn incident, Helms and other conservatives backed Ronald Reagan’s challenge to Ford.
Reagan came very close to taking the GOP nomination away from the president. Helms and his operatives engineered Reagan’s come-from-behind victory over Ford in the North Carolina presidential primary.
Ford won the 1976 nomination, but Helms had ensured that Reagan stayed alive politically to fight another day. That day came in 1980, when Reagan won the Republican nomination and then the presidency. Helms was a godfather of the Reagan revolution.
NBC News correspondent Lisa Myers contributed ot this story. |
