David Broder, Lousy Columnist
His war on Jesse Helms.

By John J. Miller & Ramesh Ponnuru
August 30, 2001 4:30 p.m.

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hen a prominent columnist accuses an even more prominent politician of being a "racist" — in the headline of his column, no less — it might be a good idea for him to provide actual examples of manifest racism. David Broder's latest Washington Post column, starkly titled "Jesse Helms, White Racist," does no such thing.

Writes Broder: "What is unique about Helms — and from my viewpoint, unforgivable — is his willingness to pick at the scab of the great wound of American history, the legacy of slavery and segregation, and to inflame racial resentment against African Americans."

Broder's first piece of evidence is a negative characterization of Helms's 1984 re-election campaign by another reporter whom he describes as "one of the most evenhanded reporters I have ever known." People who consider David Broder an authority on evenhandedness will find that convincing.

Broder goes on to criticize Helms's opposition to a national holiday for Martin Luther King Jr. and his 1990 campaign commercial denouncing employment quotas. Opposition to neither the holiday nor quotas need be motivated by racism.

One need not take the view of Walter Russell Mead — who concluded in the Wall Street Journal last week that Helms helped ensure "the triumph of the civil-rights revolution" by refraining from lawlessness — to see that Broder hasn't made his case.

(For Broder's whole column, in all of its unpersuasiveness, go here.)

(And for Mead, go here.)