News
Email
Print
Questions raised about influence of ex-Helms aides on campaign
McCain says race won't be part of his strategy
ADVERTISEMENT
Published: June 17, 2008
WASHINGTON - Sen. Jesse Helms was losing.
With only two weeks until Election Day, the elderly conservative icon trailed his younger, black challenger by eight points in the 1990 N.C. Senate race.
Helms's campaign team brainstormed and then produced a racially divisive TV ad that helped propel Helms to victory.
The ad, which political analysts call the most race-baiting campaign spot of the modern era, featured the hands of a white man crumpling a job application.
A narrator intoned: "You needed that job. And you were the best qualified. But they had to give it to a minority because of a racial quota. Is that really fair? Harvey Gantt says it is."
Today, two key members of Helms' 1990 campaign team are advisers to Republican presidential candidate John McCain in a contest with obvious racial parallels.
The bruising Democratic primary season this year was in many ways defined by race, including Barack Obama's keynote speech on the subject, the controversy involving his black church and Hillary Clinton's repeated highlighting of her strength with white voters.
Shortly after the primary season ended, McCain, in a speech to newspaper editors in Florida, said that racial appeals would have no place in his campaign.
"I will do everything I can to keep anything that may be that kind of ugliness out of this political campaign," he said.
But some of Obama's supporters aren't convinced, given the role that two of Helms' former advisers are playing in McCain's campaign.
Republican media consultant Alex Castellanos, who produced the "white hands" spot for Helms, is part of McCain's advertising council advising him on media strategy, The Washington Post reported this year.
Charlie Black, a key member of McCain's inner circle, was an important Helms adviser for decades who helped develop general strategy during the 1990 campaign, according to media accounts at the time. During that campaign, he and Castellanos were vice presidents of National Media, a GOP consulting firm.
Black, who is one of McCain's most important political advisers and has acted as a spokesman for the campaign at times, also advised presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, and held top positions in the Republican National Committee.
Rep. Mel Watt, D-N.C., an Obama supporter who managed Gantt's 1990 Senate campaign, is braced for aggressive racial campaigning by McCain.
"There's no question appeals will be made by McCain's campaign on racial lines," Watt said.
Neither Castellanos nor Black responded to requests for comment.
At the beginning of the 1990 contest against Gantt, Helms said that he would not use race to win re-election.
"Some heads will be cracked if anything is done that even appears to be racist," he said, according to Righteous Warrior, a biography of Helms by William Link, a historian at the University of Florida.
Early on, Link said, Helms' campaign knew that coded racial appeals could be effective in turning out conservative white voters, particularly in rural areas. But they feared a negative backlash that could turn Gantt's supporters out in record numbers.
Facing a major deficit heading into Election Day, though, those concerns evaporated.
The "White Hands" ad was credited for helping to increase turnout among Helms' white, conservative base. Another ad focused on a "minority preference" that Gantt had used to buy a TV station license.
The ads helped Helms turn out his white conservative base and bring uncommitted swing voters into his camp. Another strategy aimed to keep turnout down among Gantt's black supporters.
Shortly before the election, the campaign and the state Republican Party together mailed 125,000 postcards to voters in predominantly black precincts who had recently moved, warning -- falsely -- that to vote legally they must have lived at their new address for at least 30 days before the election, according to Link's biography. The postcards also threatened jail time for violating election law.
"It was hard to get them to admit what they were doing. They said that they were issue-based ads. At the end, though, their strategy was clearly based on race," Link said.
Advisers have a great deal of say in campaign strategy, but no one has more pull than the candidate himself.
On issues of racial equality, even McCain's opponents agree that he and Helms -- an opponent of the Civil Rights Act -- are in different universes.
Indeed, McCain has been on the receiving end of racially divisive campaign tactics. In the 2000 South Carolina primary against George W. Bush, political hate mailings told voters that McCain had a "black baby," referring to his adopted daughter from Bangladesh.
This spring, when the N.C. Republican Party ran ads linking Obama with statements by his pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, McCain demanded that the party pull the ad. Many of Obama's black supporters saw the Wright controversy as an attack on African-American churches.
■ Sean Mussenden can be reached at smussenden@media
Email
Print
