Steve Kornacki: Jesse Helms and MLK
[Steve Kornacki is Salon's news editor.]
The national holiday commemorating Martin Luther King that we celebrate today comes with a bitter irony: Its creation nearly three decades ago was instrumental in rescuing and extending the career of one of the most notorious race-baiters in modern American politics.
It was the fall of 1983 and Jesse Helms seemed destined for political extinction. The staunchly conservative senator was due to stand for reelection the following year, and polls in North Carolina showed him running far, far behind the Democrat who was gearing up to oppose him, Jim Hunt.
That Helms was even in the Senate was something of a fluke; the coattails of Richard Nixon, who carried North Carolina by 40 points over George McGovern in 1972, had been the main reason for his eight-point victory in his first campaign. And even in the early '80s, North Carolina was still filled with culturally conservative white voters who had been trained from birth to support Democrats. One survey showed Hunt, a moderate who was finishing his second term as governor, 22 points ahead of Helms. Another put the margin at 19. Incumbent senators just aren't supposed to overcome those kinds of deficits.
But those polls were taken before the first week of October '83, when the bill to create a federal holiday honoring King -- which had easily cleared the House over the summer -- landed in the Senate. Two of the chamber's top Republicans, Howard Baker and Bob Dole, embraced it and urged their colleagues to do the same. The GOP had once been the party of civil rights, and they hoped to attract black voters back into the fold -- both for the '84 Senate elections and for the long-term future of their party....
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The national holiday commemorating Martin Luther King that we celebrate today comes with a bitter irony: Its creation nearly three decades ago was instrumental in rescuing and extending the career of one of the most notorious race-baiters in modern American politics.
It was the fall of 1983 and Jesse Helms seemed destined for political extinction. The staunchly conservative senator was due to stand for reelection the following year, and polls in North Carolina showed him running far, far behind the Democrat who was gearing up to oppose him, Jim Hunt.
That Helms was even in the Senate was something of a fluke; the coattails of Richard Nixon, who carried North Carolina by 40 points over George McGovern in 1972, had been the main reason for his eight-point victory in his first campaign. And even in the early '80s, North Carolina was still filled with culturally conservative white voters who had been trained from birth to support Democrats. One survey showed Hunt, a moderate who was finishing his second term as governor, 22 points ahead of Helms. Another put the margin at 19. Incumbent senators just aren't supposed to overcome those kinds of deficits.
But those polls were taken before the first week of October '83, when the bill to create a federal holiday honoring King -- which had easily cleared the House over the summer -- landed in the Senate. Two of the chamber's top Republicans, Howard Baker and Bob Dole, embraced it and urged their colleagues to do the same. The GOP had once been the party of civil rights, and they hoped to attract black voters back into the fold -- both for the '84 Senate elections and for the long-term future of their party....