Senator No Pulse

Or
The Battle For Helms Deep
Racist treasonous redneck, junior college drop-out and former U.S. Senator from North Carolina Jesse Helms has died of complications from Alzheimer’s disease at the age of 86. Helms started out working for Democratic Senator candidate Willis Smith in his primary campaign against Frank Graham, developing an ad that implored: "White people, wake up before it is too late. Do you want Negroes working beside you, your wife and your daughters, in your mills and factories? Frank Graham favors mingling of the races." Another ad featured photographs Helms doctored to illustrate the allegation that Graham's wife had danced with a black man. He’d revisit racist electoral politics with his own ad showing a white job-seeker crumpling a rejection slip as an announcer explained that the job had been given to an unqualified member of a minority. After his meal ticket died, Helms returned to fan the flames of bigotry in North Carolina as a commentator before switching parties and throwing his own hat in the ring in 1972. He won and as senator, helped buoy Ronald Reagan’s insurgency in 1976, propelling him on to the 1980 nomination. Other highlights of his career included leading Senatorial opposition to the legislation making Martin Luther King Day a federal holiday, supporting Salvadoran death squads and Augusto Pinochet, serenading Carol Mosely-Braun with “Dixie” in a Capitol Building elevator, earning his reputation as Senator No by cutting or blocking funding for foreign aid, AIDS research, welfare programs and the arts and threatening President Clinton if he were to visit North Carolina without a bodyguard. To honor his forwarding-thinking approach to governance, Jerry Falwell's Liberty University opened the Jesse Helms School of Government in 2005.