Helms has made a career out of riding the hit parade of hot-button issues. In 1972, it was school busing; in ‘78, the Panama Canal treaty; in ‘84, the Martin Luther King holiday. They were all lost causes on Capitol Hill, but they helped Heltus win elections in conservative North Carolina. In 1990 he is counting on the obscenity issue to win him a fourth Senate term. There is nothing subtle about a Helms campaign. When his opponent, Harvey Gantt, recently made history as the first black to win a Democratic senatorial nomination, Helms strategist Carter Wrenn declared cultural war: “What you have opposing Helms is another coalition of homosexuals and artists and pacifists and every other left-wing group.”
The Mapplethorpe photos have been a boon for Helms’s direct-mail fund-raising operation. By suggesting that “perverted art” is just a halfstep away from a homosexual takeover, he has raised $5.6 million in mostly small donations from across the country. One appeal said that when Mrs. Helms saw some of the pictures, she cried, “Lord have mercy, Jesse, I’m not believing this”–and slammed the book shut.
High costs: On Capitol Hill, Helms is often a strike force of one. He terrorizes colleagues by threatening to portray them as pro-obscenity. But his power may have its limits. Though he has raised more money than almost every other incumbent senator running this year, he ranks near the bottom in cash on hand. Direct mail is expensive: it costs him I almost 80 cents to raise a dollar. Democrats also question whether Helms can make Mapplethorpe a metaphor for discontent about cultural values. “People are concerned about the state of American morality, but Hollywood gets a lot more blame than the NEA,” says Democratic pollster Geoffrey Garin.
A Jesse Helms Citizenship Center is scheduled to open at North Carolina’s Wingate College in 1992. The museum will mimic presidential libraries, with a replica of Helms’s Capitol Hill office. Since it will be privately funded, the curator won’t have to worry about federal censorship of the senator’s Mapplethorpe photos–even if Helms gets his way with the NEA.
