Campaign of one

Jesse Helms, 1921-2008 | Mindy Belz

Jesse Helms once got me in trouble with my neighbor. In 1990 she and her husband sported a sign in their front yard for Harvey Gantt, the former mayor of Charlotte who was running against Helms to become the nation's only black senator. Noting my lack of signage, my neighbor challenged, "Surely you're not voting for That Man?"

After I explained that I liked Helms' opposition to abortion and to government overspending, she sputtered, "You're too young to be so narrow-minded."

Helms won the election, but he continued to be a pariah among non-conservatives in his home state of North Carolina and in Washington. And to make those who agreed with him easy to caricature. It would be funny, were it not so pathological, how the vitriol continues past the five-term senator's July 4 death. Christopher Hitchens, egged on by a sneering New York Times obituary, denounced Helms in Slate as "a senile racist buffoon." Salon's James Hannaham, not to be outdone, called Helms "hellspawn" in a July 11 obit and observed that Helms' death "sent shudders of guilty relief through the spines of liberals everywhere."