Media Allowed Helms To Create His Own Myth

by Laura Flanders

The oozing condescension reminds one just why it is that this country is poorly served by having no national paper of record that hails from the South. (The capital's Washington's Post doesn't count.) Almost every mainstream outlet has taken the same tack: Helms may be unenlightened by modern (read Northern) standards, but he's been much loved by the tobacco-growing Tarheel racists for whom he's worked down South.

The fact is, Helms isn't out of step. In fact, he's a particularly good practitioner of modern politics. Buying votes, breaking federal campaign finance laws, squeezing into office with a dubious majority. There's nothing out of date about that.

The press are replaying Helms' own spin when they cast him as an anti-DC pit-bull standing up for his constituents. Look at his record, and the opposite is true -- Senator No says yes to big-spending and activist government -- as long as that means bailing out the savings and loan industry or buying boondoggle missile systems. By contrast, as Mother Jones reports, he has voted to slash school lunches for impoverished children, medical care for disabled veterans, prescription drugs for the elderly, and wages for working families back home. North Carolina ranks way down near the bottom of the list when it comes to manufacturing wages and money received per capita in federal funds, but way near the top when it comes to residents living in poverty, cancer-causing toxins, and infant deaths.

Helms' North Carolina Congressional Club, a political action committee that's been repeatedly penalized for breaking the law, freed Helms from needing the party to raise his money. Despite outspending his opponents by huge margins (by 30-to-1 in his first re-election bid), all that cash has never bought him a comfortable win. When Reagan carried North Carolina with 62 percent of the vote, Helms raised a record $16.5 million and barely edged by with 52 percent. Trailing in the polls to black architect Harvey Gantt two weeks before the 1990 elections, Helms used an infusion of national capital to air a set of overtly racist commercials and squeaked through with only 53 percent.

Far from unenlightened when it comes to the potential modern media, Helms was an early practitioner of broadcast hate. In 1960, he got a job as a TV commentator where he spent the decade railing against Dr. King, "Negro hoodlums," the media, "sex perverts," and anyone on welfare. As he explained in one of his nightly five-minute broadcasts, "A lot of human beings have been born bums." He never lost the race-bait knack.

The Times writes that "The senator, who is 79, was felled not by any political foe or even by North Carolina's changing demographics, but by age and illness, probably the only forces that could have persuaded him to quit." Many pundits have quipped that he was undefeatable, but it's false. Helms never won an election by more than 55 percent, and when he was seriously challenged it was even closer than that. He clung to power by pandering to big money, breaking this nation's campaign finance laws and using character assassination to derail the democratic process. Sadly there's nothing old fashioned about any of that.