Why Kay Hagan Lost In North Carolina

The Huffington Post, 11-13-14

   

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CHAPEL HILL, N.C. -- When the smoke cleared, the most expensive contest of 2014 had become the costliest Senate race in U.S. history. More than $111 million was spent by both sides in the North Carolina battle for incumbent Democratic Senator Kay Hagan's seat.

Hagan ultimately came up short, losing by 45,608 votes out of 2.9 million cast to Republican N.C. House Speaker Thom Tillis.

So what happened? As a sitting Senator running for re-election at a time when the recovering economy still hasn't translated into income gains for most voters, Hagan faced historical headwinds, and President Obama's deflated approval ratings didn't help. But beyond those national factors, here are two critical reasons why Hagan lost her seat:

(1) Wealthy right-wing outside groups led by the Koch brothers and Karl Rove spent tens of millions on attack ads and get-out-the-vote efforts against Hagan.

Big money was put up to poison the well of Hagan's support among North Carolina voters. Hagan had a huge target on her back, described in one news story after another as one of the most vulnerable Senate Democrats. The Koch brothers' political machine began pummeling her with attack ads over her support for the Affordable Care Act before it was even signed into law in early 2010.

The pace intensified in 2013, and by February of this year, the Koch brothers' dark money group Americans For Prosperity had already expended $8.2 million on TV, radio and digital ads designed to defeat her. At that point in the cycle, it was an unparalleled sum to have been spent in one state, more than all Democratic outside groups had sunk into every 2014 Senate race in the country combined.

   

   

N.C. voters couldn't escape the attack ads, which carpet bombed the state. "If anyone hasn't seen those ads, they haven't just been under a rock," said Vanessa Johnson, a voter from Winston-Salem. "They've been down in Bedrock with the Flintstones!" According to the Wesleyan Media Project, fully two-thirds were negative, the highest percentage of negative ads aired in any Senate race this year.

Crossroads GPS (the dark money group co-founded by Karl Rove) piled on, falsely claiming Hagan cast the "deciding vote" for the Affordable Care Act, and blaming her for the discredited myth that the law cut over $700 billion from Medicare. "That means North Carolina stands to lose over $16 billion in Medicare payments," one ad warned.

Other Crossroads GPS ads were full of similar distortions, accusing Hagan of wanting to "raise (the) social security retirement age," "reduce (the) home mortgage interest deduction," "increase out-of-pocket Medicare expenses," and "give us cuts to our Medicare."

   

   

In her own campaign ads, Hagan stressed her moderate, centrist philosophy, but the Koch brothers and Karl Rove defined her as a Barack Obama puppet from early on. Outside groups reported spending $34.5 million by election day to tear down Hagan and prop up Thom Tillis.

Besides financing a deluge of attack ads, the Koch brothers realized they needed to compete with the Democratic Party's ground game. So Americans For Prosperity greatly expanded its field organizing this year in North Carolina and others states with key Senate races. They announced plans to put half of the $125 million they would spend on the midterms into a stronger ground campaign, hiring 500 field staffers nationwide. In the Tar Heel state, this built on AFP's earlier organizing efforts.

A top priority of the group for years, North Carolina was one of the first states where it set up local chapters, helping build what (AFP President) Tim Phillips says is one of its "deepest state infrastructures," with more than 130,000 activists that helped defeat a Medicaid expansion in the state Legislature last year and now is singularly focused on defeating Hagan. - Politico, 2/12/14

Hagan pushed back, making the Koch brothers' attempts to buy the election a campaign issue in her ads and campaign speeches. "The people of North Carolina need to know what their agenda is," Hagan said last February. "They want to have tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy and, at the same time, put that burden on the middle class and the poor."

But her counterattacks may not have resonated with voters. "It's utterly ineffective. Elections have to be about voters and what candidates will do for them," argued Thomas Mills, a top advisor to the state's unsuccessful Democratic Senate nominee in 2010, N.C. Secretary of State Elaine Marshall. "And this strategy is more about the candidates. It says, 'Look at me! Help me -- they are spending money against me.' There's no connection between that and voters."

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(2) Democratic voters were fired up about opposing Thom Tillis and the GOP agenda in North Carolina, but not overwhelmingly behind Kay Hagan.

Overall turnout was 44 percent of North Carolina's registered voters, the exact same percentage of voters who cast ballots in 2010, the last time there was a midterm Senate battle. It was nowhere near the state's record in modern history for midterm turnout, when 62 percent of registered voters showed up for the hotly contested 1990 Gantt-Helms race.

With 1.42 million votes in all, Tillis fell slightly short of the 1.46 million ballots cast in 2010 for Richard Burr, North Carolina's senior Republican Senator. But it was enough to beat Hagan's 1.38 million total, even though that was 230,000 more votes than the 1.15 million received by Burr's Democratic challenger Elaine Marshall.

Democrats cast 49 percent of all early votes, with the GOP accounting for only 31 percent. But on election day, just 36 percent of voters were registered Democrats, versus 35 percent Republicans. The 29 percent of independent voters broke for Tillis by a margin of 49%-42%, and helped push him over the top.

Why didn't more Democrats turn out for Hagan?

According to Mark Chilton, a veteran elected official in liberal Orange County, N.C. who won his first election in 1991 as a 21-year old undergraduate, "Hagan made the strategic choice to run as a centrist and the tactical decision to run a Beltway-approved, paid TV-oriented campaign." As a result, it was harder for voters to feel part of a popular movement devoted to electing her. "The Democrats needed a different electorate to show up at the polls," said Chilton. "But the same-old strategy got us the same-old electorate, and the same-old results."

Quoted in Mother Jones, an unemployed former construction worker from Raleigh expressed the lack of enthusiasm many low-income voters may have felt about their Senator, even those who planned to vote for her. "Kay Hagan, to me she's wishy-washy, she's two-faced," said Michael Curtis. "But Tillis is an out-out crook."

Hagan is no populist. Rather, she has been a centrist, business-oriented Democrat from the time she entered public office, when she was first elected to the N.C. Senate in 1998. Although she settled in North Carolina after attending law school at Wake Forest University, Hagan grew up in Florida. She is from one of the wealthiest and most politically connected families in the southwest central part of the Sunshine state, and her uncle was former Florida Governor and U.S. Senator Lawton Chiles.

Before public life, she was a corporate lawyer and eventually a vice president at North Carolina National Bank, which was later bought by Bank of America. She ran for the Democratic nomination for U.S. Senate in 2008 "with backing from the business and political establishment," as noted by a profile at the time.

Once elected, Hagan supported enough of President Obama's first-term agenda to be accused by Tillis and his billionaire backers of voting with Obama 96 percent of the time. She voted for the 2009 economic stimulus, the Affordable Care Act, and against extending the Bush tax cuts.

   

But she also veered to the right on several issues. She endorsed the Keystone XL pipeline, and in the election's closing weeks made the unfortunate decision to support a West African travel ban, after getting hammered by Thom Tillis' truly shameless attempts to whip up Ebola hysteria. He was the first Senate candidate to call for a travel ban, and opened the floodgates to a wave of GOP demagoguery over Ebola.

Hagan turned her back on the DREAMers when she was one of only five Democratic Senators to vote against the DREAM Act in 2010. Latino activists swore they would remember when Hagan faced re-election, and they did, disrupting some of her rallies and erecting billboards around the state denouncing Hagan's immigration-related stands. Yet their efforts may have been a wash, helping inoculate Hagan against Tillis' charges that she was too pro-immigration. Exit polls showed Latino voters only made up 3 percent of the N.C. electorate in 2014, with inconclusive results as to which candidate they preferred.

With her corporate background and a campaign that stressed her centrism, many low income voters in North Carolina, be they white, black, or brown, may not have felt Kay Hagan was leading the fight on their issues. It would explain why voters who earned less than $30,000 a year only made up 19 percent of the 2014 electorate, down from 25 percent in 2012. This was a body blow to Democrats, because the ones who did vote backed Hagan 63%-30%. By contrast, 24 percent of all voters made more than $100,000, and went for Tillis by a 59%-39% margin.

And it left an opening for the GOP to try and convince voters that Thom Tillis would do the most to look out for their economic interests and create jobs.

   

44 percent of North Carolina voters named the economy as the top issue facing the country, and split 52%-44% for Tillis. 64 percent of N.C. voters who cast ballots this year favored a higher minimum wage, according to exit polls. But 29 percent of them voted for Tillis, even though he explicitly opposed it, and Hagan wanted to raise it to $10.10 an hour. The minimum wage was one of the few economic issues where she drew a sharp contrast between herself and her opponent, but an insufficient number of low-income voters noticed.

During a presidential year with substantially higher turnout, Hagan more than likely would have been re-elected. When she won her first Senate term in 2008, Hagan outperformed Barack Obama in North Carolina by over 100,000 ballots, leading the statewide ticket with 2.25 million votes.

In this year's midterm election, with opposition to her party's sitting President giving Republicans all the motivation they needed to vote, enlarging the electorate was Hagan's only hope of surviving the onslaught of right-wing money determined to take her down. Her campaign ran the largest field operation ever in an N.C. Senate race, with 40 offices, 100 staffers, and an estimated 10,000 volunteers.

Yet by the time the polls closed, not enough Democratic voters had gotten excited enough about Kay Hagan to save the day. "I don't think a field operation can create enthusiasm - it can mobilize enthusiasm," observed Democratic strategist Gary Pearce.

No one should count Hagan out of politics too soon. She could still make a comeback run in two years for Republican Sen. Burr's seat. But Mark Chilton sums up what's on the mind of many North Carolina Democrats right now.

"We can lazily chalk up this result and many others across the country to 2014 being a bad year for Democrats," said Chilton. "Or we can seriously ask ourselves whether we need a new approach - on policy, on style, and on demography."

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How The Koch Brothers Are Bait And Switching Voters

Huffington Post, OpEdNews, 11-3-14

   

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As the midterm elections approach, the volume of attack ads is deafening. Spending on broadcast TV and national cable ads for U.S. Senate, House, and gubernatorial races has now topped $1 billion for the 2014 election cycle, according to a report released Oct. 29 by the Wesleyan Media Project.

Of the 2.2 million political ads TV viewers have seen since early last year, 600,000 were aired by outside groups, not candidates themselves. Almost 40% of these came from so-called "dark money" groups, which are not legally required to reveal their donors.

Two years ago, big money Republican donors thought dark money funneled through Karl Rove's political operation was going to send President Obama packing and install a GOP Senate. Things didn't quite turn out that way. Nearly $175 million six of the eight Republican Senate candidates they tried to elect.

Karl Rove hasn't gone away, and this cycle, his groups have already spent a combined $31 million on TV ads alone. But in light of Rove's disastrous 2012 results, this year's mega-rich GOP donors initially flocked to the multi-billionaire Koch brothers, who promised a different approach. And the Koch network has stuck to this new strategy, which involves using non-ideological appeals to convince independent voters to support Republican candidates, even if these voters don't agree with the GOP candidates' right-wing policy agendas.

It is on display in the Koch-produced ads that have been pouring from TV screens in some of the nation's most closely contested Senate races.

     

     

The "closing argument" ads shown above have been airing in six states (Alaska, Arkansas, North Carolina, Colorado, Iowa and New Hampshire) since October 22. They will run through election day in a $6.5 million ad buy from Freedom Partners Action Fund (FPAF), the super PAC launched last June by the Koch brothers.

Here's how USA Today described them:

Instead of going on the attack, the ads use a gentle, testimonial style. They feature voters against a backdrop of classic Americana scenes, explaining how disappointed they are that the Democratic incumbent has strayed from local values.

Besides Charles and David Koch, who kicked in $2 million each, top donors to the FPAF super PAC include New York hedge fund mogul and rising GOP kingmaker Robert Mercer ($2.5 million), who was sued last year for allegedly stiffing his household help; Texas oil billionaire Paul Foster ($1 million), whose association with the Koch network has previously caused controversy because of his position as chairman of the University of Texas System Board of Regents; and Arkansas poultry magnate Ronald Cameron, who gave $1 million.

FPAF is on track to spend nearly $25 million to influence the 2014 elections, part of $290 million that Koch-backed groups claim they will spend altogether. It is more than either national party committee spent during the 2010 election cycle.

The Koch brothers' latest twice-annual retreat for big donors to their shadowy political network was held in California last June. Rising GOP stars came to audition and preen for a crowd of super wealthy right-wingers, knowing the cash these multi-millionaires and billionaires wield could be instrumental to turbo-charging their campaign funds. Senate Minority Leader and fierce campaign finance reform opponent Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) addressed the crowd. Three Republican U.S. Senate candidates also spoke: Iowa state senator Joni Ernst, and Congressmen Tom Cotton of Arkansas and Cory Gardner of Colorado. In August, secret tapes were released of what was said behind closed doors at this gathering, as the conservative plutocrats plotted how they could most effectively buy elections and advance their far right-wing agenda.

Of particular note were the remarks by top Koch brothers strategist Richard Fink, recently dubbed "Charles Koch's Brain" by Politico when he made #16 on their list of the 50 most influential thinkers, doers, and dreamers of America in 2014. He explained that by tailoring messages to the "non-ideological middle third of voters," they could sway them to support the fatcats' preferred candidates a lot easier than by using past methods.

"Yeah, we want to decrease regulations. Why? It's because we can make more profit, okay? Yeah, cut government spending so we don't have to pay so much taxes. When we focus on decreasing government spending, over-criminalization, decreasing taxes, it doesn't do it, okay? We've been reaching (this) third by telling them what's important - what we think is important should be important to them. And they're not responding and don't like it, okay? Well, we get business - what do we do? We want to find out what the customer wants, right, not what we want them to buy."

Audio starts at 4:18 of Richard Fink's remarks

In the run-up to Nov. 4, North Carolina has seen 2014's most intense battle of the airwaves in a Senate race, as detailed by the Wesleyan Media Project's report. There were over 20,000 ads aired in the two weeks from October 10-23, with 36.3% of the ads coming from pro-GOP outside groups, and 30.2% from pro-Democratic outside groups. Freedom Partners Action Fund ads during this period have attacked incumbent Democratic Senator Kay Hagan over non-ideological issues such as high wait times at VA hospitals and the Affordable Care Act's supposed negative effects on the quality of N.C. education.

     

Any voter who might be swayed by these ads would surely be interested in knowing the facts they left out. Namely, that Hagan's opponent Thom Tillis has consistently called for massive federal spending cuts and embraced Paul Ryan's budget plan, which would negatively affect the VA system. Or that as Speaker of the Republican-led N.C. House, he passed a budget last year that shortchanged education spending by $481 million, according to The New York Times.

Iowa has experienced the second most intense Senate TV ad war, with over 17,000 ads aired during the same two week period in October. Pro-Republican ads have accounted for 9,581 of them, vs. 7,835 pro-Democratic ads, with 51.2% coming from pro-Joni Ernst outside groups and 34% from groups supporting her Democratic opponent, four-term U.S. Rep. Bruce Braley.

     

     

FPAF ads have been running non-stop accusing Braley of "disrepecting farmers" when he warned donors that a Republican-led Senate would see "a farmer from Iowa who never went to law school, never practiced law" become the next chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee. He was referring to Iowa's Republican Senator, Chuck Grassley. Another ad says Braley is setting "the wrong kind of examples for children" because he missed votes in Congress. An online ad labels him "not very Iowa" because he complained to his neighborhood association about a neighbor whose chickens were roaming freely into his yard, fowl which were also the subject of other residents' complaints. It appears to be part of a six-figure digital ad buy from the Koch brothers' dark money group Americans for Prosperity.

These ads don't say a peep about Ernst's extreme right-wing views. Or the undisputed facts that Ernst opposed the five-year farm bill that passed Congress earlier this year, and has stated she is philosophically opposed to "taxpayer subsidies" like the Renewable Fuel Standard - two things that directly benefit Iowa farmers. Or that as a state Senator, according to Politico, "Ernst missed nearly 40 percent of the votes in the Iowa state Senate during 2014," and "has also attended only a fraction of the meetings of the Iowa boards and commissions she has been appointed to since taking office in 2010."

And the chicken controversy is full of it, described by Slate as "how a guy mishandled the problem of chickens shitting on his lawn." At their Sept. 28 debate in Des Moines, Joni Ernst was ready to make hay over the issue. "Congressman, you threatened to sue a neighbor over chickens that came onto your property," Ernst said. "That's just not true," Braley replied. "I never threatened to sue anyone." Politifact rated Ernst's claim False, concluding "there is no material evidence that Braley threatened a lawsuit against the neighbor or was even considering one. Even the neighbor says that."

But as the Koch brothers and their ultra-wealthy cronies think they've figured out, a little chicken manure goes a long way when it comes to misleading voters into supporting the GOP.

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Pro-McCain Group Dumps 28 Million Scare DVDs in Swing States

The Huffington Post, 9-12-08

(UPDATE 9/13 - 70 newspapers in swing states have been paid to distribute Obsession this weekend and next, which means not all the DVDs have been delivered yet. Check the list at the end of this post to see if your newspaper is one of them, and let them know how you feel about their participation in this shameless propaganda campaign.)

This week, 28 million copies of a right-wing, terror propaganda DVD are being mailed and bundled in newspaper deliveries to voters in swing states. The 60-minute DVDs, titled Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against the West, are landing on doorsteps in a campaign coinciding with the 7th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks. Funding is coming from a New York-based group called the Clarion Fund, a shadowy outfit whose financial backers are unclear.



The program was originally shown on Fox News in the days leading up to the 2006 mid-term elections, and far right-wing activist David Horowitz toured the country screening the film on college campuses during 2007. Mainstream religious groups have called Obsession biased and divisive. It cuts between scenes of Nazi rallies and footage of Muslim children being encouraged to become suicide bombers.

Talking heads in the film include infamous anti-Muslim, self-proclaimed "islamophobes" like Daniel Pipes and Walid Shoebat. In 2001, Pipes claimed the "presence" and "enfranchisement" of Muslims in the U.S. presented "true dangers to American Jews." Shoebat is an evangelical Christian who falsely claims to be a former Muslim terrorist. Last year, Shoebat told the Missouri Springfield News-Leader, "Islam is not the religion of God - Islam is the devil."

As detailed in an OffTheBus report on HuffPo two days ago, the DVDs were distributed last weekend in national editions of the New York Times and Wall Street Journal within selected swing states. These included Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Colorado, Iowa, Florida, Wisconsin, Nevada, New Hampshire and Virginia.



Sally Lopez of Lemoyne, PA displays a copy of the DVD that came in the mail.

Here in North Carolina, another battleground state that John McCain must win to reach 270 electoral votes, 160,000 copies of the DVD are to be distributed tomorrow by the state's leading newspaper.

The Raleigh News & Observer reported yesterday on its Under The Dome politics blog that the paper is preparing to bundle copies of the DVD with this Saturday's newspapers. Jim McClure, vice president of display advertising for the N&O, said the "ultimate decision" to distribute the DVDs had been made by publisher Orage Quarles, and compared the propaganda to harmless household samples.

"'Obviously, we have distributed other product samples, whether it's cereal or toothpaste,' he said. He declined to say how much the agency paid."

The News & Observer recently announced deep buyouts and layoffs for its employees. It is owned by the struggling McClatchy news chain, which is slashing newsroom jobs and pages at the papers it owns around the country. Advertising revenues have plummeted during the ongoing economic downturn, and it appears the N&O is now auctioning off its journalistic integrity to the highest bidder.

The paper's announcement touched off immediate criticism from angry subscribers:

"A box of cereal? Toothpaste? Does a box of cereal or a tube of toothpaste encourage me to look with hatred and suspicion on my law abiding neighbors who have a different religion than mine? Does cereal and toothpaste lead to pogroms, religious harassment, fear and intimidation? The trailer for this video is about hate, pure and simple, and shows the video has only one goal -- to instill fear and hatred of neighbor against neighbor.

If I receive this DVD in my paper, that day, after 22 years of receiving the N&O, will be the last day of my subscription.

Please, please reconsider this decision!"

Although supposedly a 501 c(3) non-profit, this week the Clarion Fund's website featured an article supporting John McCain. Yesterday, the Patriot-News in PA reported on the DVDs showing up in Pennsylvania, and noted:

"On Wednesday, though, there was an article on the group's new Web site, www.radicalislam.org, that backed Republican presidential candidate John McCain. The article discusses both candidates and concludes: "McCain's policies seek to confront radical Islamic extremism and terrorism and roll it back while [Barack] Obama's, although intending to do the same, could in fact make the situation facing the West even worse."

According to Clarion Fund director of communications Gregory Ross, the article "crossed the line" and would be removed.

Where else exactly are these DVDs landing, and who's funding the Clarion Fund?

If you'd like to give News & Observer executives a piece of your mind, executive editor John Drescher can be reached at (919) 829-4515, or drescher@newsobserver.com. Or ask for publisher Orage Quarles at the paper's main phone number, (919) 829-4500.

(UPDATE 9/13 - Greg Mitchell of Editor & Publisher has more details. And here's a state-by-state list of most of the 70 newspapers in swing states that have agreed to deliver this garbage to their subscribers:

Colorado - Boulder Daily Camera, Centennial Citizen, Colorado Springs Gazette, Denver Post, Fort Collins Coloradoan, Greeley Tribune

Iowa - Daily Nonpareil, Des Moines Register, Iowa City Press Citizen, Quad City Times, Sioux City Journal

Florida - Daily Commercial, Florida Times-Union, Ft. Lauderdale El Sentinel, Ft. Myers News Press, Miami Herald, Ocala Star Banner, Orlando Sun Sentinel, Palm Beach Post, Tampa Tribune, Tallahassee Democrat, St. Petersburg Times, South Florida Sun-Sentinel

Michigan - Detroit Free-Press, Flint Journal, Grand Rapids Press, Lansing State Journal

Missouri - Springfield News-Leader

Nevada - Las Vegas Review-Journal/Sun, Nevada Appeal, Reno Gazette-Journal

New Hampshire - Portsmouth Herald News, Union Leader

New Mexico - Clovis News Journal, Hobbs News-Sun, Rio Rancho Observer

Ohio - Canton Repository, Columbus Dispatch, Dayton Daily News, Hamilton JournalNews, Middletown Journal, Morning Journal, Springfield News-Sun, Toledo Blade, Youngstown Vindicator

North Carolina - Charlotte Observer, Raleigh News & Observer

Pennsylvania - Bucks Co. Courier Times, Erie Times-News, Morning Call, Philadelphia Inquirer, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, Reading Eagle, The Patriot-News

Virginia - Sun-Gazette, Virginian-Pilot

Wisconsin - Green Bay Press-Gazette, Janesville Gazette, Journal Times, La Crosse Tribune, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel)

(UPDATE 9/15 - Only two papers bravely refused to push this poison on their communities - the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in Missouri and the Greensboro News & Record in North Carolina. The American Muslim website has posted a lengthy list of "Resources for Responding to Obsession DVD Mass Distribution," and a detailed look at organizations and individuals involved in the production, promotion and distribution of the film - "Who is behind Relentless, Obsession and The Third Jihad?"

The progressive Jewish group JewsOnFirst.org has a thorough report on the Clarion Fund’s background and role in pushing these hate DVDs. Highlights include the film's past ties to the Republican Jewish Coalition, Clarion's rent-an-address location, its incorporator, New York attorney Eli Greenberg, spokesman Gregory Ross’ implausible denial that the Fund also paid to distribute Obsession at both the Democratic and Republican conventions, and Ross’ statement that the Clarion Fund will not disclose its donors’ names.



Obsession at the conventions.

However, one detail in this report seems mistaken, that "because it was established only recently, the Clarion Fund has not yet filed its first required disclosure (Form 990) with the IRS." According to the New York Secretary of State’s website, the Clarion Fund was incorporated nearly two years ago, on December 28, 2006. So where are their Form 990's? Hello, IRS?)

(UPDATE 9/26 - NPR's Secret Money Project has picked up the trail of who's behind the Clarion Fund, and posted good information HERE and HERE. Earlier today, NPR also aired a story on Morning Edition - "Charity Floods Swing States With Anti-Islam DVD." Omid Safi of the American Academy of Religion has exhaustive coverage of Clarion Fund backers in his post, "Who Put Hate in My Sunday Paper?")

(UPDATE 9/30 - On Sept. 26, four days after the Dayton Daily News in Ohio distributed Obsession to its subscribers, there was a cowardly attack on three hundred American Muslims at a Dayton mosque. Unknown assailants, described by a witness as two white men, sprayed a toxic substance through a window of the mosque into a room where infants and children were waiting as their parents conducted Ramadan prayers. Chris Rodda of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation has the full story, including excerpts from a graphic e-mail sent out by a family member of children who were gassed. Dayton police are refusing to treat the attack as a hate crime.



The incident has received little mainstream media attention since it occurred, except for one post from yesterday by Philadelphia Daily News senior writer Will Bunch. Not surprising, because it's pretty damning evidence that the newspapers who distributed Obsession DVDs have stirred up intolerance and hatred in their communities and encouraged this kind of terrorism.)

Digg It.

Jesse Helms' Shameful Legacy Can't Be Whitewashed

The Huffington Post, 7-13-08

(Note from 2014: This post is excerpted from the new eBook available on Amazon - When Harvey Met Jesse: Attack Ads of the 1990 Gantt-Helms U.S. Senate Race in North Carolina)

The urge to speak no ill of the dead is a powerful one. And it was on full display this week as former Senator Jesse Helms was laid to rest. Although one brave North Carolina state employee, L.F. Eason, resisted that urge when he refused to lower the flag at his state lab to honor Helms and was forced to retire.

Republican leaders including Vice President Cheney attended Helms' funeral. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky eulogized Helms as one of the "kindest men" in Congress, and said, "no matter who you were, he always had a thoughtful word and a gentle smile."



Which is a load of crap. Clearly, McConnell saw the charming face Helms could present to the world when he wanted to. But the real Jesse Helms oozed out nearly every time he opened his mouth to slander those who didn't agree with him. He claimed "crime rates and irresponsibility among Negroes are a fact of life which must be faced" in a 1981 New York Times interview, and in 1963 asked, "Are civil rights only for Negroes? White women in Washington who have been raped and mugged on the streets in broad daylight have experienced the most revolting sort of violation of their civil rights."

Helms reserved his full disgust for gays and lesbians, who he called "weak, morally sick wretches" (1994), accused of engaging in "incredibly offensive and revolting conduct" (1990), and warned his constituents to beware "homosexuals, lesbians, disgusting people marching in the streets, demanding all sorts of things, including the right to marry each other" (1990).

Beyond his hateful words, Helms' bigotry was shown by his political aims. He led the opposition to the federal Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, supported the apartheid regime in South Africa, and consistently opposed civil rights legislation. For nearly two decades, he fought tooth and nail against expanded federal funding for AIDS research, and exploited gays and lesbians as convenient scapegoats in his constant fear-mongering crusade.


Helms at 1990 campaign rally, moments after calling gays "disgusting people"

Media post-mortems of Helms' career were mostly deferential, especially in North Carolina, the state he represented in the Senate for five terms. N.C. television stations and newspapers glossed over almost all of Helms' ugly history as the last unapologeticly racist politician of the segregation era. Even the liberal Raleigh News & Observer kept its gloves on, despite having been Helms' favorite press punching bag for years.

It was largely a repeat of the softball treatment Helms got when he announced his retirement in 2001. Then, the Washington Post called Helms "one of the most powerful conservatives on Capitol Hill for three decades," and the New York Times said he'd been "a conservative stalwart for nearly 30 years." But they avoided serious discussion of how Helms stirred the pot of bigotry and hatred to win elections and further his political career.

Helms grew up in small town Monroe, N.C., home to an active Ku Klux Klan. His father, known as Mr. Jesse, was the police chief and a mean, imposing 6' 4" man who didn't hesitate to intimidate and run roughshod over the civil rights of Monroe's black citizens.


Jesse A. Helms, Sr.

In North Carolina historian Tim Tyson's biography of civil rights leader Robert Williams, head of the Monroe NAACP, Williams described watching when he was eleven years old as Mr. Jesse beat a black woman on the street, then "dragged her off to the nearby jailhouse, her dress up over her head." He was haunted for years by the woman's "tortured screams as the flesh was ground away from the friction of the concrete."

Interviewed in 2005 for the documentary Senator No and asked about Monroe in the 1920s and 30s, Helms said, "In so many ways I think the relationship between the races was far better than it is now. I could give you a thousand examples of why I'm convinced of that. I don't know of anybody who ever persecuted anybody of another race."

Helms had his first brush with statewide politics in 1950. Employed as a radio reporter for conservative magnate A.J. Fletcher's WRAL network, he unofficially aided right wing Raleigh attorney Willis Smith in his primary campaign against incumbent U.S. Senator and North Carolina liberal hero Frank Porter Graham.

Graham beat Smith in the initial Democratic primary, and Smith had all but decided not to call for a runoff. But three Supreme Court decisions undermining segregation were announced within weeks, inflaming racial tensions in the South. Helms took to the airwaves and urged Smith's voters to assemble at his Raleigh house and ask him to reconsider. A mob of supporters responded, and Smith called for a runoff.


The scene outside Willis Smith's home in Raleigh, June 1950

In the runoff, Helms used the skills he had learned as a reporter to help create scurrilous, race-baiting ads and handbills for Smith's candidacy. One was headlined, "White People - WAKE UP Before It's Too Late," and asked, "Do you want negroes working beside you, your wife and daughters in your mills and factories? Frank Graham favors mingling of the races."


Handbill created by Jesse Helms for Willis Smith's 1950 runoff campaign

The most infamous was a flyer featuring a fake photo, doctored to show Sen. Graham's wife dancing with a black man. Helms and his backers later went to great lengths to cover up his role in the Smith campaign, but as biographer Ernest Furgurson put it, "Jesse was in it up to his neck." Helms went to Washington with the victorious Sen. Willis Smith, hired as his top assistant.

Throughout the 1960s, Helms denounced the civil rights movement from his bully pulpit as the most widely known TV and radio commentator in North Carolina. He delivered snarling five-minute commentaries that were broadcast twice a day at the end of WRAL's newscasts, railing against integration, liberals, and anything the Kennedys said or did. Helms' diatribes were reprinted in newspapers throughout North Carolina and the South with titles like "Nation Needs to Know of Red Involvement in Race Agitation!"

He called civil rights workers "Communists and sex perverts," claimed there was "evidence that the Negroes and whites participating in the march to Montgomery participated in sex orgies of the rawest sort," and commented "they should ask their parents if it would be all right for their son or daughter to marry a Negro," in response to students holding campus vigils when Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968.

Helms won election to the U.S. Senate in 1972 after tying his Greek-American opponent to George McGovern and using the slogan, "Jesse Helms: He's One of Us!" He was soon dubbed "Senator No" for his votes against government spending on social programs, including education, environmental protection, school lunches, food stamps, and aid to the disabled.

During the 1976 presidential campaign, Helms and his political organization, the National Congressional Club, made a lasting impact on American politics by helping Ronald Reagan come from behind to win the North Carolina primary. This victory sparked a surge for Reagan in the late contests that almost led to his unseating President Gerald Ford as the Republican nominee. It sealed Reagan's position as the 1980 frontrunner following Ford's narrow general election loss to Jimmy Carter.



To win North Carolina, the Helms machine went all out. They ran hard-hitting attack ads slamming Ford over the Panama Canal Treaty. And of course, Helms used racially coded appeals. Tens of thousands of leaflets were distributed that alleged Ford was considering picking a black running mate.


Button from 1976 Republican Convention

Close Helms advisor Tom Ellis founded the National Congressional Club in 1973 to retire Helms' first campaign debt. He later admitted the Club's role in distributing the race-baiting leaflets against Ford, at his 1983 confirmation hearing to serve as a Reagan appointee to the Board for International Broadcasting. Ellis was forced to withdraw after it was also revealed that he served as Director of the Pioneer Fund from 1973-77, which funded research into racial genetics and churned out reports alleging blacks were genetically inferior.


National Congressional Club founder Tom Ellis

In the late 70s, Helms called for ending sanctions on formerly white run Rhodesia, today’s Zimbabwe. His aides interfered with negotiations to turn over rule to the country’s black majority by encouraging then-Prime Minister Ian Smith to hold out for more concessions.

Helms was a strong supporter of the apartheid regime in South Africa. He voted against virtually every U.S. measure ever proposed to pressure the white minority government, no matter how mild. Speaking against one attempt to impose economic sanctions, Helms claimed, "all this bill does is exacerbate the situation in South Africa." Referring to anti-apartheid protests, he asked, "who are we to be so pious about the efforts of the South African government to stop the riots, the looting, the shooting and the mayhem that's going on over there?" Even when Congress overrode a Reagan veto and finally imposed sanctions in 1986, by a lopsided Senate vote of 78-21, Helms voted no, arguing the move would result in a "lasting tyranny" of Communism in South Africa.

He even served for a time as chairman of the editorial advisory board for a conservative think tank called the International Freedom Foundation, founded in 1986, run by disgraced Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff. The IFF was later revealed to have been set up and funded by the South African government, dedicated to waging “political warfare” against enemies of apartheid. When Newsday broke the truth in 1995, Helms spokesman Marc Thiessen (now chief White House speechwriter for George W. Bush) claimed Helms had “never heard of” IFF.


N.C. students protesting apartheid cross paths with Helms, 1984

Helms filibustered against renewal of the Voting Rights Act in 1982. The next year, he made national headlines and drew heavy criticism when he led the charge against making Martin Luther King Jr. Day a federal holiday.

In his 1984 re-election fight against sitting N.C. Gov. Jim Hunt, Helms went to the mat in a knock-down, drag-out campaign remembered as one of the nastiest campaigns in modern history. Perhaps realizing he had overreached in his overt displays of racism, Helms dialed back his attacks on blacks and minorities, although he still stirred up fear of Jesse Jackson's presidential campaign. According to the Washington Post, "his campaign newspaper featured photographs of Hunt with Jackson and headlines like ‘Black Voter Registration Rises Sharply’ and ‘Hunt Urges More Minority Registration.’"

But Helms had found a even scarier bogeyman - the homosexual menace. He and his supporters repeatedly linked Jim Hunt to gay activists and took every opportunity to "throw rocks at the gays," as the N.C. Republican Party chair explained Helms' strategy.


Helms at press conference, 1982

During the 1980s, as the AIDS crisis unfolded, Helms led the opposition in the U.S. Senate to increased federal funding for AIDS research. This was perhaps Jesse Helms' greatest crime, and left real blood on his hands. Even a modest increase in spending could have saved tens of thousands of gay Americans who died horrible, painful deaths in the years before effective AIDS drugs were developed.

In 1987 he said, "Somewhere along the line we're going to have to quarantine people with AIDS." Helms' uncaring response to the disease was explained by his tirade the next year against the bipartisan Kennedy-Hatch AIDS bill, when he claimed, "There is not one single case of AIDS in this country that cannot be traced in origin to sodomy."

Helms continued to oppose AIDS funding throughout the 1990s. In 1995, he fought reauthorization of the Ryan White Act, saying AIDS victims contracted the disease through "deliberate, disgusting, revolting conduct." That same year, nationally syndicated advice columnist Ann Landers called him out as a liar when she published a sharp rebuke to his efforts to cut AIDS funding, headlined "These are the facts, Sen. Helms."


Helms makes his point, 2002

Sadly, this account only scratches the surface of all Jesse Helms' shameful words and deeds. No amount of whitewashing Helms' legacy can erase the stain of his reliance on hate-filled, divisive politics, or the hurt he caused so many people in the process.

How Jesse Helms Ruled North Carolina

The Huffington Post, 7-8-08

(Note from 2014: This post is excerpted from the new eBook available on Amazon - When Harvey Met Jesse: Attack Ads of the 1990 Gantt-Helms U.S. Senate Race in North Carolina)

Jesse Helms’ death comes as no surprise, since his health had rapidly declined after he retired from the U.S. Senate in 2002. Yet it’s fitting that he died on the Fourth of July. Helms was a disgrace to North Carolina and the nation, and what better time to celebrate our independence from the bigoted, hate-filled politics he stood for.



Helms was the dominant political figure in North Carolina from the early 1970’s until his retirement. For more than a decade before that, he had been the leading conservative voice in the state as a radio and television commentator for Raleigh's WRAL network.



After his election to the Senate in 1972, he started a political operation called the National Congressional Club that pioneered the use of direct mail fundraising techniques to build a nationwide base of fervent conservative supporters. In the process, Helms helped reinvigorate the national Republican party, laid groundwork for the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, and became the far right's most infamous spokesman.



Helms urges Christians to get political in a 1980 promo spot for the Moral Majority

During Helms’ heyday, the question on many people’s minds about North Carolina was how could its citizens keep re-electing an extreme right wing, unrepentant segregationist, self-proclaimed “redneck” like Helms? The perception was that the state was filled with racists, or that Helms’ voters were ignorant and uneducated. The reality is more complex.

For one thing, he started in Tar Heel politics as a household name thanks to his decade-long career as a radio and TV commentator - the Rush Limbaugh of his day. Helms got lucky running for election in the GOP landslide years of 1972 and 1984, coasting on Nixon and Reagan’s coattails. He faced a black opponent twice at a time when no other African-Americans were in the Senate. His national fundraising operation ensured he would almost always have a financial advantage over his opponents. And Helms shrewdly made sure his office would be second to none when it came to constituent service, helping North Carolinians navigate the federal government bureaucracy. This last factor in particular won him many votes over the years.

But Helms did rely on hate-mongering to keep himself in power. He denounced Democrats, liberals and communists in virtually every breath, then went far beyond that. Helms’ vicious, bullying attacks on African-Americans, gays and lesbians, civil rights workers, the poor, and AIDS victims were legendary. His speeches, direct mail appeals, and campaign ads were a steady stream of bile.



Campaigning in Lenoir, NC, 1991

Helms poisoned the ideological well of North Carolina politics, and helped drag the entire country further to the right. Especially damning were Helms’ own words, his countless mean-spirited, prejudiced public statements for which he never apologized.

During the 1960’s, Helms ruled the North Carolina airwaves. As radio and TV news director at WRAL, his five-minute Viewpoint commentaries were broadcast twice a weekday at the end of the station’s morning and evening newscasts. They were rebroadcast on the 70 N.C. radio stations that made up WRAL’s “Tobacco Network,” and published in newspapers across North Carolina and the South.



Helms delivered more than 2,700 Viewpoints from 1960-1972, all taking hard line stands against desegregation, busing, Vietnam War protests, and anything else progressive. He blamed the civil rights movement on outside agitators, accused Martin Luther King Jr. of being a communist, and called the 1964 Civil Rights Act “the single most dangerous piece of legislation ever introduced in the Congress.”



Locking down the tobacco vote during Helms' first Senate campaign, 1972

The N.C. Republican Party recruited Helms to run for U.S. Senate in 1972, against a three-term liberal Democratic Congressman named Nick Galifianakis. His name was so long it needed two campaign buttons to fit it all, and Helms’ slogan was, “Jesse Helms: He’s One Of Us!” Linking Galifianakis to George McGovern, who was deeply unpopular in North Carolina and would lose the state by forty points, Helms rode Nixon’s huge victory to a 54% win and his first Senate term.

In 1978, he raised $8 million through his direct mail base, the most raised by any Senator up to that time. Facing a weak opponent who had been disowned by the state Democratic party, Helms outspent him by 30-1, and was re-elected with 55% of the vote.



Helms with Ronald Reagan in the Oval Office, 1981

Reagan’s 1984 re-election landslide helped Helms beat popular, incumbent N.C. Governor and moderately liberal Democrat Jim Hunt by a 52-48% margin. Hunt raised $9.4 million, but Helms outspent him by nearly 2-1. The Hunt-Helms race was loud, nasty, and notable for Helms’ use of gay-baiting to pull out a win.

The $26 million spent by both candidates funded a two-year war of political attack ads that according to the New York Times, "defined the use of saturation negative media...[and] set the stage for the search-and-destroy tactics of the 1988 Bush Presidential campaign." Jim Hunt had been expected to seek a rematch, but as 1990 approached, he announced he would not be a candidate.

Helms’ direct mail money came in small amounts, with the same contributors being asked to give again and again over time. The success of Barack Obama’s current presidential fundraising juggernaut rests largely on the same principle, updated for the twenty-first century using the internet. Contributors to Helms were mostly elderly conservatives who lived outside North Carolina, from whom he raised more than $15 million in contributions averaging less than $35 each between 1987 and 1990.

In 1990, Helms ran for his fourth Senate term against former Charlotte mayor Harvey Gantt, who was the first African-American candidate ever nominated for a U.S. Senate seat by the Democratic Party. The Gantt-Helms U.S. Senate race was the most closely watched political battle of the year. National media descended on the state, camera crews and print reporters rushing from campaign appearance to appearance as if a presidential campaign was unfolding.



Gantt was Helms’ polar opposite in every conceivable way. A proud liberal running against the most right-wing conservative in the Senate. One of the heroes of the civil rights movement, the first black student to integrate Clemson University, versus a notorious white bigot who opposed desegregation. A challenger with a positive, progressive agenda of change taking on the incumbent dubbed Senator No for his opposition to social programs, foreign aid, and AIDS research.



The most infamous Helms attack ad of the campaign was dubbed “White Hands.” It showed the hands of a white male crumpling a job rejection letter, and claimed Gantt supported “racial quotas.” But Helms aired many other hard hitting ads that put Gantt on the defensive. Some accused Gantt of wanting to “cut defense up to $300 billion,” and of favoring abortions "in the final weeks of pregnancy," plus sex-selection abortions. Helms flooded the airwaves with attacks on Gantt’s credibility, values, and race.



Gantt pulled even with Helms in polls taken that summer, and by mid-October, led Helms 49-41 in a Charlotte Observer poll. In response, Helms blitzed the state in a series of campaign rallies and unleashed a final wave of attack ads, including the “White Hands” spot, released five days before the election. He spent more than $13 million overall compared to Gantt’s slightly less than $8 million. On election day, Helms defeated Gantt by a 53-47% margin.

Six years later, Gantt sought a rematch. He rallied opposition around the country to Helms and made up the fundraising gap, actually outspending Helms by $8 million to $7.8 million. Helms’ bankroll was much smaller than in 1990, following a messy split with the directors of his own National Congressional Club. Helms refused to debate and his health became an issue in the campaign.

Progressives had high hopes for a Gantt victory the second time around, but he fared little better against Helms. Like he had tied his earlier opponents to Democrats like McGovern and Mondale, this time Helms capitalized on Bill Clinton’s weakness in North Carolina. Clinton would lose to Bob Dole by 49-44%. Unlike in 1990, Gantt never led in polls during 1996, and Helms again beat him by a 53-46% margin.

Despite his election victories, Helms always faced opposition within the state. In his five Senate campaigns he never won more than 55% of the vote. A popular bumper sticker for years read, “I’m from North Carolina, and I don’t support Jesse Helms.”

To shore up his support, Helms’ machine coined the slogan, “You may not agree with Jesse, but at least you know where he stands.” It became a crucial part of his image. When Helms turned into a favorite target of the left, it only fired up his appeal among older, white, rural North Carolinians. National criticism consistently helped him solidify his base at home. Helms’ voters said, “He’s a sonofabitch, but he’s ours.”



Editorial cartoon from Raleigh News & Observer, 1990

In the end, North Carolina found enough reasons to keep Jesse Helms in the U.S. Senate for three decades. We may be rid of Helms, but his toxic legacy won’t soon be forgotten.