I have to quit talking about people. Remember I was speaking critically of Tim Russert just days before he died. Then on Thursday, no kidding, I was driving around listening to a right-wing talking head (a fill-in for Hannity, but does it really matter?) when he was speaking about disproportiant funding for such-and-such health issue. I turned to my passenger and noted that was exactly the point Jesse Helms made about AIDS funding: that it was disproportionately high compared to the number of people afflicted with AIDS.
Then yesterday I learned Helms had died. The N&R writes your typical “for better or worse” editorial:
There was a brand of honesty in Helms’ politics that’s especially hard to find today. But shooting straight doesn’t count for a lot if you’re aiming at the wrong target. So, even though we always knew where Jesse stood, too often it was in the wrong places.
And it was just that honesty that drew me to Helms as I was completing my conversion to conservatism in the early 1990s. Yes, there was the controversial 1994 Clinton bodyguard comment. Earlier, the Weekly Standard’s Fred Barnes interviewed Helms about Clinton’s fitness to be commander-in-chief:
When Helms does submit to an interview, he’s breathtakingly candid. In 1995, I asked Helms on CNN if he thought Clinton was up to the job of being commander in chief. Helms said no, a flat, honest answer that other politicians would have been afraid to give. Later, he joked to a North Carolina reporter that Clinton should get a bodyguard before coming to North Carolina. (Washington reporters tried to make a major story out of this by suggesting it was a threat to Clinton’s physical safety.)
Imagine that. But what I remember about the interview was Helms’ remark that, as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he’d be happy to work with the Clinton administration on foreign policy, providing the administration got off its ass and gave him something to work with.
Note the Winston-Salem Journal takes a pass. No doubt they’re working a whopper for Sunday’s edition as we speak. Should be interesting.
