The year was 1990.

Republican incumbent North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms

was polling behind his black Democratic challenger,

a man named Harvey Gant.

It was a surprisingly competitive election, so Helms called in the political consultants

who in turn helped the Helms campaign figure out a way to fight back. And this is what they came up with,

this ad.

You needed that job and you were the best qualified, but they had to give it to a minority because of a racial quota. Is that really fair? Harvey Gant says it is.

Gant supports Ted Kennedy's racial quota law that makes the color of your skin more important than your

qualifications. You vote on this issue next Tuesday. Four racial quotas

Harvey Gant, against racial quotas, Jesse Helms.

That ad, with the white hands holding the rejection letter

as the narrator intones,

you were a better candidate than the minority guy that they went with.

Can you feel the injustice of it all?

That ad was exactly what Senator Jesse Helms needed.

He won re-election to a fourth term in the Senate, 54 to 46 percent.

That strategy worked.

It worked well.

Making Gant the face of affirmative action, a racial quota system that kept whites at a

disadvantage in favor of less qualified minorities. That was potent stuff, the

race-bating and the zero-sum politics. It moved people because it angered them.

...