Word: helmsely
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Dates: during 1990-1990
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Twelfth Night The most imaginative response to the debate over the National Endowment for the Arts was this La Jolla (Calif.) Playhouse staging, which cunningly conceived the priggish functionary Malvolio as a precursor of Senator Jesse Helms. Far from merely polemic, the production was visually the most ravishing at any...
Sleaziest Election Campaign When Republican Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina faced a stiff challenge from black Democrat Harvey Gantt, he bashed gays, then feminists, linking Gantt to their causes. Finally, he turned to race baiting, airing a TV spot that depicted white workers' frustration at racial quotas. Helms won...
Enter Bill Bennett, academician, Education Secretary in the Reagan Administration, ex-head of Bush's antidrug program. Like Bush, Bennett had stumped for Helms. In his first statements as the designated G.O.P. chairman, Bennett defended Helms' campaign strategy as "perfectly legitimate." He also criticized affirmative-action programs generally. After all...
...carpet bombing a month ago. Virginia Governor Douglas Wilder sent Bush an open letter admonishing him to practice "moral leadership." The ideal of equal opportunity, Wilder said in a message that got wide attention, "is not a political football to be used by our President to appease the Jesse Helmses of this country." House majority leader Richard Gephardt, a possible candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, placed the Republicans on "a new trail of racial resentment and recrimination blazed by David Duke, then trod successfully by Jesse Helms and now given a tarnished patina of intellectual respectability by William Bennett...
Bush's more moderate advisers, already queasy about Bennett's approach, argued inside the White House that the President's image would suffer. "This is a powder keg," said an official privately. "Somebody is going to read racism into every word you say on this subject. You don't want...