Gantt, a Democrat and successful architect, had spent much of his life beating the odds: the first African-American to attend Clemson University and the first black to lead North Carolina's largest city and finance center. While Helms was attacking the arts, welfare, and foreign aide, Gantt was talking about improving education, economic growth, and controlling crime and drug abuse. He was holding a fragile lead in the polls and nothing the Helms campaign tried seemed to help.

During a rally in Burlington, a textile mill town, Helms railed against government-funded art and invited the folks to come up and view loose-leaf notebooks showing examples of government-funded art he considered objectionable. But, before people came forward, he admonished that only men take up the offer in order to avoid offending the delicate sensibilities of the ladies.

Helms could be a courtly Southern gentleman of the old school and just as easily heap scorn on someone he saw in the way of his objective. Civilities be damned. His personal grace was often an astounding contrast to the strident and lip-curling invectives he spewed as a television commentator and later as the rhetorical godfather of the ideological wing of the Republican Party.

In 1972, Helms went to the US Senate with the idea that he was going to change institutions and the government reforms of substance and content. But as Helms bows out of office after five terms, his legacy lies more in the style of the debate than the content of policy. He made North Carolina an incubator for a style of campaigning that spread to presidential campaigns.

Negative campaigning, attack television ads, extensive and explosive direct-mail money-raising are all staples of today's campaigns that can trace their roots to Helms and his political machine. Until the early 1990s, Helms's political action committee was among the leaders in money-raising and spending. He seemed to be an old-style politician, using parliamentary tactics to block actions he opposed or appointments he detested. He took nearly every opportunity to demand roll-call votes on seemingly minor motions concerning hot button issues and put each senator on the record.

But Helms looked beyond the simple vote or the parliamentary tactic. Down the road there would be a campaign, a money-raising opportunity or an election. Regular, nearly obsessive polling by Helms's campaign operatives helped shape the issues - particularly seemingly inconsequential ones - that the senator would press on the Senate floor. A minor vote during a rushed roll call, in the hands of his campaign advisers, could become fodder for a series of commercials, nationwide direct mail appeals for contributions, and part of the effort to craft and define opponents' images to voters before opponents could explain themselves.

In 1976, Helms elevated the issue of turning the Panama Canal back to Panama into a wedge issue that many analysts say saved Ronald Reagan's political career. Reagan was on the verge of being blown out of politics by Gerald Ford. But Helms and his brain trust pressed the canal issue and Reagan won the North Carolina primary, helping Reagan continue as a force.

Helms leaves a political progeny that is defined by their conservatism, but more so by style. They specialize in sparking divisiveness. It is a strategy born out of a campaign approach that, first and foremost, contends that the primary objective is to win over each voter. They know in most political contests, each candidate probably starts with an unmovable 45 percent to 47 percent of the electorate. So the battle is over the remaining 8 or 10 percent.

What's important is what it takes to move that 8 or 10 percent. With massive use of television, requiring tremendous amounts of money, candidates are rarely seen since they're busy raising money and leaving the message crafting and image-making to the handlers.

Today, many of those who started in Helms's political brain trust are sought after and have become prominent in their own right:

Ralph Reed, former head of the Christian Coalition and now head of the Georgia Republican Party; Alex Castalanos, the take-no-prisoners media adviser who created the infamous white hands commercial for Helms 1990 Senate campaign that appealed to base prejudicial fears; Arthur Finkelstein, a longtime Helms pollster, until it was revealed that he was gay and with his male partner had adopted a child; Tony Fabrizio, Bob Dole's chief pollster and strategist in 1996, and others.

As Helms leaves the Senate, his legacy will endure. It is a triumph of style over substance, the sound bite over thoughtful contemplation, and the wedge issue over the search for the common thread.

Seth Effron is deputy curator of the Nieman Foundation at Harvard University. He spent 18 years covering government and politics in North Carolina as a reporter and editor.

© Copyright 2001 Globe Newspaper Company

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