Here is Marc Thiessen returning to his weekly column at The Washington Post with a certain political swagger, as he argues for the political rehabilitation of Jesse Helms. Mr. Helms is the political precursor to the Tea Party rebellion as Mr. Thiessen argues it. Both share a penchant for a particular brand of political nihilism; but as Thiessen argues it, that is what made Mr. Helms so powerful: his ability to go for broke and dare his opposition and then to triumph over them using their willingness to compromise with his dictates, in order to move certain legislation forward. I am reminded of Trent Lott's remarks regarding Strom Thurmond's presidential run of 1948 as the same sort of wishful thinking,less maladroitly argued by Mr. Lott.
Mr. Thiessen, I think, is a speech writer of talent, which might be described as the fomentation of a usable political hysteria: using guilt by association and rabble rousing, and the versatile 'us vs. them' gambit in all its variations, to effectively neutralize opposition, in the tradition of Richard Nixon, Lee Atwater and Karl Rove. But in the case of the rehabilitation of Mr. Helms, a person whose whole persona was, to put it kindly, prickly:he was, most aptly, a precursor to the Neo- Confederate Movement. An attempt to rewrite the history of the Civil War in terms of valorizing Southern Victim-hood. Mr Thiessen is a speech writer but the job of this rehabilitation will take a concerted effort of many individual voice, working in harmony to effect this kind of revisionism. Mr. Thiessen has begun this process, inauspiciously, but his column is the first and probably not the last, to cast the public person of Jesse Helms in the light of the civic republican hero.