Former Republican Sen. Jesse Helms Dies At 86

From his early days as television commentator and on through a three-decade career in Congress, former Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) never left any doubt about his beliefs. "When he wrote his book, 'Here's Where I Stand,' I felt no book was needed," said North Carolina Sen. Elizabeth Dole, who won Helms' seat after he retired in 2002. "(My husband) Bob would say, 'You don't have to look under the table for Jesse. You always knew where Jesse is.'" Helms died early yesterday at the age of 86, having spent the past few years out of the spotlight while in declining health at a Raleigh, North Carolina convalescent home.

Helms was against civil rights and gay rights. Against abortion and communism. Against school busing and giving up the Panama Canal. He said "No!" so often that by the end of his first time, his hometown newspaper gave him the nickname "Senator No." It wasn't meant as a compliment — but Helms took it that way. "There was plenty to stand up and say "No!" to during my first term in the U.S. Senate," Helms wrote in "Here's Where I Stand." "In fact, that was why (I had) run for the U.S. Senate — to try to derail the freight train of liberalism that was gaining speed toward its destination of 'government-run' everything, paid for with big tax bills and record debt."

Friends remembered him as a patriot. Many noted with reverence that he died on the Fourth of July, as did Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, and praised his legacy as an unyielding conservative champion. "When the Democratic Party sort of moved to the left in the 1960s, I think that a lot of conservative Democrats felt like they lost their voice, and eventually that lead to the realignment of the Republican Party," said Carter Wrenn, who worked with Helms for 20 years as a leader of his political machine, the Congressional Club. "That realignment during the time Reagan and Jesse were in office turned the Republican Party into a conservative party. Jesse was one of the main voices of that conservatism."

But there were also reminders that as the caustic "Senator No," Helms was a politician who delighted in forcing roll-call votes that required Democrats to take politically difficult votes on federal funding for art he deemed pornographic, school busing, flag-burning and other cultural issues. He was a standard-bearer for civil rights foes, opposing the 1964 Civil Rights Act as a commentator and voting against its reauthorization once in the Senate. In his last two runs for Senate in 1990 and 1996, he defeated former Charlotte Mayor Harvey Gantt, who is black, by running racially tinged campaigns. In the first race, a Helms commercial showed a white fist crumpling up a job application, with these words underneath: "You needed that job...but they had to give it to a minority." "He'll be remembered, in part, for the strong racist streak that articulated his politics and almost all of his political campaigns — they were racialized in the most negative ways," said Kerry Haynie, a political science professor at Duke University, who noted that unlike George Wallace and Strom Thurmond, Helms never repented for such tactics.

My response: Until yesterday, I thought dude was already dead. Anyway, I was never a Jesse Helms fan, whose conservatism was racialized and exclusive. I'm definitely in the Jack Kemp conservative school of racial equality, democratizing capitalism, etc. My conservative uncle yesterday said he wasn't a Helms fan. "He was old-school conservative, with that racist outlook. Not my guy", said Unc.