ON THROWING OUT A RASCAL
James Bowman on the
black Democratic challenger to Jesse Helms
Winston-Salem, North Carolina IF YOU can name two serving United States senators, chances are that Jesse Helms of North Carolina is one of them. For 18 years he has been nothing but trouble to the enlightened progressive con- sensus. This is a valuable political service in itself, and then there is his impoliticly forthright opposition to abortion, porn- ography and legislation sympathetic to homosexuals. Don't forget that he also opposes extravagant environmental laws, federal funding for the arts and education and conciliatory attitudes towards com- munist and other left-wing tyrannies. Such an impressive collection of negatives has earned him the nickname 'Senator No' and has made him at once one of the most admired and one of the most hated men in America. Now, however, he himself is in trouble, and on his home turf.
I went to North Carolina last week to find out why. In an election season in which a third of the Senate, the whole House of Representatives and a majority of state governors are up for election, this is one of the two or three most closely watched races. Both to his supporters and to his detractors, Helms embodies the old Reagan coalition of economic liberals and social conservatives now being threatened by a revival of the even older Carter- Mondale brand of economic fine-tuning and social liberalism. A week before the election it looks as if the Reagan coalition is losing. President Bush's reneging on his promise of `no new taxes' and the frac- tiousness within the party which it has occasioned.
Part of the damage is being done by a generalised disgust with congressional in- cumbents of both parties. Mr Jack Gargan of Tampa, Florida, has taken in half a million dollars in small donations from around the country for his organisation called Thro, or Throw the Hypocritical Rascals Out. But, whatever else you may call Jesse Helms, you can't call him hypoc- ritical. That's one reason why here it has always been said that a corpse could collect 40 per cent of the vote if it stood against Jesse in a general election.
His Democratic opponent this time around, Harvey Gantt, the black 47-year- old former mayor of Charlotte, seems at least less corpse-like than Helms himself, who, at 69, is said to be in poor health. Kept in Washington by the protracted and demoralising budget negotiations, he has hardly been seen in the state during this campaigning season and was reduced to communicating with his election rallies by speaker-phone until only a week before the election on next Tuesday.
Last Saturday night in Greensboro I went to one of these rallies. A cluster of reporters pointed their tape-recorders and video cameras at the box of the speaker- phone, which beamed back at them with its cyclops eye. It was like something out of Star Trek: here was the disembodied brain of a Klingon prince giving instructions to his followers long after his death. And when the disembodied brain made a char- acteristically blunt political point, the gang of fresh-faced kids standing at the back waved their placards and chanted 'Jess-see, Jess-see' in unison over the heads of the smiling old folks sitting down in front. But where was the generation in between?
At the Gantt rally in Asheville, it seems. There they were feeling warm and self- congratulatory and Sixties-ish all over again, said a friend of mine, who actually spotted peace signs and love beads. It is the baby-boom generation, keen to preserve North Carolina's reputation for progres- siveness and enlightenment, which has always found Jesse Helms to be an embar- rassment. In the past, this strange, black- yuppie alliance in the urban centre of the state has been outnumbered by conserva- tive whites in the poorer, agricultural east and the mountains of the west who vote for Jesse. Now this may be changing. With ten days to go until the election, an opinion poll showed Gantt with an eight- point lead, a margin which Gantt himself quickly denied could be that large. Com- placency is not a vice of Jesse Helms's opponents. Moreover, recent elections have shown that more white voters will tell a poll-taker that they plan to vote for a black man than will actually vote for him. But the momentum seems to be going Gantt's way. Even in Jesse country some of the edge has gone off the Helms rhetoric about the 'extreme liberalism' of his oppo- nent and the 'North Carolina values' that he himself claims to represent. North Wilkesboro, a town of about 4,000 people on the edge of the western mountains, is as likely a place as any to look for 'North Carolina values'. Here people tend to be white, to work for (not very high) wages in the furniture industry or the poultry processing plants and to vote Republican. But here 200-300 people came out on a chilly Friday evening, high school football night, to welcome Harvey Gantt. When Harvey spoke it was of his con- cern for the environment, for health care, poverty, illiteracy, crime and drugs and a whole host of things that he thought government could do for these hitherto self-reliant mountain folk. Above all, he stressed education. This state is ranked dead last among the 50 in its score on the SAT, the machine-graded test widely used for university entrance assessment as a measure of aptitude. A lot of people who Could never hope to go to university themselves are worried about this. North Carolina's honour is at stake.
Of course, the state-administered educa- tional system, assuming it could do any- thing about its pupils' scholastic aptitude in any case, is something for which Jesse Helms, a federal legislator, bears no share of responsibility, any more than would Harvey Gantt in his place. But that's politics, and it has been that kind of year for Jesse Helms. Although he himself voted for protectionist legislation to res- trict textile imports, he is criticised here for failing to persuade his President and fellow Republican not to veto it. Also, having dared to antagonise both artists and homosexuals over obscene and tomoero- tic' art, he now finds himself the number- one political target of the Hollywood Left and the intelligentsia of both coasts. This might actually work to his advantage in North Carolina, and he has made great play of the fact that collections are being taken up for Gantt in the gay bars of San Francisco, New York and Washington. Unfortunately, they are also being taken up in, for example, the North Carolina State Nurses Association, whose reception in Winston-Salem I attended.
There is no human creature more digni- fied than a North Carolina matron. The ballroom of the Hyatt Hotel was packed with them that night, but they were squeal- ing like schoolgirls when Harvey came in. A rock band played a specially adapted version of Chuck Berry's 'Johnny B. Good' called, inevitably, 'Harvey B. Good' and the candidate, after accepting a cheque from the head nurse, came down and gyrated with the rest of them for ten minutes before boogieing out the door. One who had had her hand shaken said that she would never wash it again. Nearly all these nurses were white. I thought then that Harvey would win.
The next morning I wasn't so sure. Gantt was leading the 'Homecoming' parade at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College, a mostly black institution in Greensboro. The equally black crowd lin- ing the streets for two or three miles and watching Harvey glide by in the back of an aging convertible with a 'Jesus Saves' plate on the front was supportive but not enthu- siastic. Several called out, 'You got my vote, Harvey', and he smiled and waved, but it must have seemed a bit of a let-down after those nurses the night before. He can count on 90 per cent of the black vote, but it won't be enough if there is a low turn-out. As he passed, one girl called out, `Send us some more money from Washing- ton, Harvey.' Perhaps his efforts to appear a plausible and responsible candidate to the white voters has disappointed those among the blacks who think there is more money in Washington to send than Harvey has lately admitted to. He's not promising enough for them.
But he has less to worry about from a low black turn-out than Helms does from a low Republican turn-out. Not only is it an off-year election, when the absence of a presidential campaign holds down interest, but it is also taking place at a time when Republicans are feeling particularly de- moralised by what they see as the Demo- cratic triumph in the budget negotiations and the throttling back of the engine of Reaganomics. All over the country Repub- lican candidates who had high hopes only a few weeks ago are now expected to go down to defeat. President Bush's skilful handling of the Gulf crisis seems hardly to be an issue in this at all. In North Carolina, home of the 101st Airborne, both candi- dates support the President.
And Jesse is tired. Much play is being made of the fact that recently he is sup- posed to have fallen asleep during an audience with the King of Saudi Arabia. A fellow Republican loyally came to his support by saying, 'I was there, and I didn't see anybody fall sound asleep.' But whether or not he snoozed at the Saudi audience, it will be strange indeed if this most prominent maverick and system- bucker in the US Congress is one of the few incumbents to be thrown out in the general disgust with time-serving politicians.
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