Steve Sailer makes jokes:

Why is John McCain in Colombia? The most reassuring theory I can come up with is that McCain intends to bring back a couple of sixty pound suitcases that the Secret Service will hustle for him through Customs. And soon Obama’s big lead in campaign finance will have vanished. And there won’t be anymore questions about McCain being too old to have the energy for the job as he starts campaigning 96 hours straight.

On the other hand, there are more alarming interpretations, such as that McCain is taking a serious interest in the geopolitical situation in Northern South America — i.e., he wants to get us involved in a war there.

Given John McCain’s legendary openness to the press, one might think that someone on the “straight talk express” would want to ask McCain which Latin American states, if any, fall under the scope of his “rogue state rollback” scheme. Cuba, presumably. But also Venezuela? Bolivia?

Senator Mitch McConnell and Heritage Institute President Edwin Feulner both praise Jesse Helms for a career of work on behalf of “free markets and free people.” Of course, if you were a right-wing Latin American dictator, Helms was also for you. For example, Alex Massie reminds us of Helms’ support for Argentinian aggression against the Falklands Islands:

“The tilt toward Britain will destroy the coalition we must have if we are to prevent a Communist takeover of Central America,” said North Carolina Republican Jesse Helms, the lone opponent of a Senate resolution endorsing a pro-British policy.

Elsewhere in Republican presidents thankfully not being nearly as crazy or stupid as Helms in national security matters, he also “condemned President Nixon’s historic 1972 trip to Beijing as ‘appeasing Red China.’”

John J. Miller on Jesse Helms:

He “opposed civil rights”? Uh, no. He opposed a particular vision of them.

Here’s an ad Helms helped make for Willis Smith’s 1950 Senate campaign against Frank Graham:

White people, wake up before it is too late. Do you want Negroes working beside you, your wife and your daughters, in your mills and factories? Frank Graham favors mingling of the races.

The “particular vision of civil rights” that Helms opposed was the vision in which African-Americans are permitted to work beside white people and in which the races are permitted to mingle.

UPDATE: See also “The civil rights movement, as Dr. King calls it, has had an uncommon number of moral degenerates leading the parade”. Helms, unlike today’s National Review writers, didn’t seem to have been confused about this. He, like National Review, opposed civil rights.

Alan Jacobs offers one about the late Senator Jesse Helms:

[A] story I heard years ago from a young man who as an undergraduate did an internship in Helms’s office. Senator Helms was a particular target of Bono’s persuasive powers, and indeed near the end of his career he threw his considerable weight behind increased funding for AIDS projects in Africa. This young man claimed that he was in the office one day when Bono came by with the Edge in tow.

“Senator Helms,” Bono said, “I’d like you to meet the Edge.”

Helms stuck out his hand. “It’s a pleashuh to meet you, Mistuh the Edge.”

Other wacky anecdotes include Helms’ staunch support for apartheid South Africa, whistling “Dixie” in front of Carol Moseley Braun when she joined him in the United States Senate and how he enjoyed “railing against [Martin Luther] King, ‘Negro hoodlums,’ the media, ‘sex perverts,’ and anyone on welfare.”

One strange aspect of the settlement of the Civil Rights controversy was that this social and political upheaval resulted in surprisingly little actual political turnover. Instead of segregationist politicians being defeated and hounded of out public life, in essence they agreed to stop challenging the core principles of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts (gutting enforcement under GOP presidents was still okay) and in exchange everyone else agreed to sort of ignore their backgrounds. I’ve written about this before with regard to John Stennis and James Eastland but it’s remarkable how little removed we are from the era when vast power was wielded in American politics by people with backgrounds as white supremacist politicians of which I guess you’d say Robert Byrd is the last.

And, of course, within that group there were considerable distinctions, with Helms holding distinction as amongst the very least-repentant.

Noam Scheiber and Jonathan Chait debate whether or not John McCain’s flip-flop attacks against Barack Obama will work. Since Chait seems to think these attacks are both effective and unfair, it might be nice for him to spend some time dealing with the unfair flip-flop charges coming from his colleague James Kirchick.

But beyond that, my thought on this question is that conventional wisdom radically misconstrues the nature of the relevant decision-making process. In my model of the electorate, the majority of voters are voting as blind partisans. Of the rest, most are being driven by the macro factors (shitty economy, sick of Bush) or purely by issue salience (vote Republican when I care about national security, vote Democratic when I care about the economy) or other such things. And yet, few people like to say that kind of thing. And this is where the campaign comes in.

The main impact of campaign attacks, I think, is not to actually change anyone’s mind but rather to familiarize everyone with the talking points of the side they agree with. In 2000, voters who valued “experience” turned out to favor Al Gore strongly. In the 2008 campaign, I think it’s clear that voters who value “experience” will favor John McCain. That’s not, however, because there’s some coherent bloc of “experience” voters who shifted loyalties — it’s because “experience” was a Democratic talking point in 2000 and it’s a Republican talking point in 2008 so people change which candidate attributes they value. In 2004, you could find a lot of Democrats who thought John Kerry military service proved important things about his fitness for office, whereas in 2008 Republicans are more likely to say that about John McCain.

I think that if Obama becomes unpopular and loses the election it’ll be because a larger number of voters decide that having a “tough” foreign policy is the most important thing. But if they reach that conclusion, they’ll find themselves suddenly agreeing with all manner of other attacks from John McCain’s camp. By contrast, if voters continue to be focused on their desire for a sharp break with Bushism, voters will find pretty much anything Obama throws at McCain persuasive.

More panel:

Some joke about corporate sponsorship here.

Condoleezza Rice is “proud of the decision” to invade Iraq. This kind of sentiment, which John McCain has of course echoed, not only reveals a strange attitude toward the wisdom of the decision to invade but a profound gap in strategic judgment between mainstream American conservatives and normal people.