Cliff Schecter: the race-baiting and Red-bashing 'Senator No'

It is almost fitting that Senator Jesse Helms - longtime US Senator from North Carolina, onetime right-wing political commentator and a constant conservative voice on both domestic and foreign policy issues in American politics for the past half decade - passed away during an election year that may indeed see the demise of the conservative coalition that he was a key player in building. Ronald Reagan gets the monuments. Richard Nixon is credited with the "Southern strategy". But no single politician - save perhaps Strom Thurmond - embodied the manipulation of race, religion and the overarching set of issues known simply as "family values" to bring the once-solid Democratic South into the GOP fold. Helms, using resentments as old as the South and as new as the racial tension seething in major American cities in the 1960s,... [read full story]