Recently, as Jesse Helms, the senior Senator from the state of North Carolina announced that he would not run for reelection in the 2002 Senatorial election, a few thoughts occurred to me.
During my high school years, I attended the Free Enterprise Leadership Conference at Wingate University in Wingate, North Carolina, Senator Helm’s alma mater. At the concluding portion of this leadership conference, Senator Helms made a keynote address to the conference’s participants.After his address, there was ample opportunity to meet and greet the Senator. Thus, I had the opportunity to meet Jesse Helms and speak with him for a brief moment in time.

Meeting Helms created quite an indelible impression in my mind, an impression that is quite different from the Jesse Helms that is often shown to the greater public. Jesse Helms was a wonderful individual, charming, charismatic, and displayed a dry wit in answering my questions. After meeting Helms, I began to form a different perspective on him.

Considering that he has been a Senator from North Carolina since 1972 serving five terms, I realized that people had to like him to keep electing him.

This is basic precept, but because of the negative attention focused on his garrulous nature and inappropriate remarks you tend to forget that Helms truly represents his constituents. After all, isn’t that what a politician should do?

Living in North Carolina since 1986, I feel that I am qualified to judge the true nature of my adopted state. North Carolina attempts to be a cosmopolitan, high-tech, banking center, yet its true nature resides in people like Jesse Helms, who have seen the state rise and fall. The tobacco farmers in the East, the blue-collar industrialists of the mountains, the small town schoolteacher of the Piedmont, this is what North Carolina is about. In that precise sense, Jesse Helms is doing exactly what he should be doing, representing those people in Washington.

As a politician, you must speak for the voices that cannot be heard, that are repressed by the system. To be elected to five consecutive terms to the Senate, as Helms has, is a true testament that he is representing his constituents and they are rewarding his hard work with more opportunities to speak for them.

Whenever I mention to someone from out of state that I am from North Carolina, the name Jesse Helms always comes into play with a series of groans and embarrassed laughter from me. Helms does not represent the political ideologies of everyone from the state of North Carolina, yet he has carried the majority of the electorate for five terms.
For me, that and a brief encounter with Helms are enough to open my eyes to a new perspective on the Senator. Rarely do I agree with Jesse Helms, but I often respect him and that is something I can rarely say about a politician today.