Helms was one of the last true conservatives in the Senate. Helms put anti-communism before “democraticization,” stood up for Southern Heritage, opposed bureaucratic “civil rights” agenda, and the cult of Martin Luther King. This makes him an easy target for liberals to smear, but most grassroots conservatives and the old guard of the “movement” see Helms as a hero. This puts the beltway right in a bit of dillema.

Mindful of this fact, and that some of the editors are old enough to remember Helms in his prime, National Review penned a relatively kind obituary.

To be sure he’s not seen as a Helms supporter, Jonah Goldberg made two posts where he separated himself and the conservative movement from Helms. Goldberg makes clear that the only reason NR didn’t didn’t condemn Helms in the obituary was that ”we chose kindness over a more honest accounting” in death.

He insists that he was“never a huge fan of Helms.” He goes on,“ Was he always a racist? I don’t know. But my guess is, yeah. He was certainly insensitive, and I don’t just mean politically incorrect. Calling all black people ‘fred’ strikes me as more than one bridge too far.”

Rather than defend Helms from the Left, he tries to defend the Conservative movement and the GOP from any association with Helms. The extent of his defense of Helms is that he received “ praise he received from so many decent and un-racist conservatives” who deserve credit for “constraining” him.

National Review’s editorial defends Helms’ famous “hands” ad which attacked racial preferences as discriminatory against whites. However they had to qualify, “Given his past, Helms may not have been the best advocate for a message of colorblind equal opportunity. . .”

Ramesh Ponnuru adds, “I think the ad was defensible, and the argument it makes correct. But it’s too bad that the person making it was a former segregationist.”

I can’t remember the last time a Republican had the guts to challenge a black Democrat on affirmative action—much less take it on as an anti-white policy rather than “violating the vision of Martin Luther King” or enforcing “the soft bigotry of low expectations.”

This election cycle, the heroic Ward Connerly is currently trying to get his Civil Rights Initiatives on state ballots. Will John McCain jump on the issue? Given that he tried to sabotage Connerly’s efforts in the past, I find this doubtful.

For some reason, I’ve yet to see Ponnuru or Goldberg criticize McCain for his support of race preferences. (To their credit, some at National Review have criticized McCain on this front, before he got the nomination.)

Here’s a suggestion for Goldberg and Ponnuru: spend your time attacking pro-preference Republicans and cowardly “conservatives” instead of bemoaning how dead conservatives heroes who had the courage to fight for their convictions had too much “baggage” to fight for what you claim to believe in.

Slate’s Today’s papers says

Although McCain spent much of the primary campaign assuring Republicans that his priority in immigration policy would center on securing the border with Mexico, he’s now singing a different tune. Mindful of the growing importance of the Latino vote in swing states, as well as the fact that Barack Obama has a strong lead with that group of voters, McCain is now espousing “a message that gives equal weight to helping employers and immigrant workers and their families,” says the LAT. In new ads, McCain says that dealing with the needs of immigrants is “as important” as securing the border. Although he never comes out and says he wants to create a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants, “his subtle language matches that of legalization advocates,” notes the LAT.

Obama, as a Democrat, is trying to convince the same Latino voters that he’s a professional panderer:

McCain wasn’t alone in trying to appeal to Latino voters yesterday. (”Como se dice ‘pander’ en Español?” quips the Post’s Dana Milbank.) Obama also addressed Latino voters yesterday and said they shouldn’t believe the words coming out of McCain’s mouth. “We need a president who isn’t going to walk away from something as important as comprehensive reform when it becomes politically unpopular,” Obama said.

Also in Slate, Mickey Kaus analyzes McCain’s speech to LULAC:

First say “First”: McCain’s speech before the Latino Organization of the Day makes sure to include the word “first.”

“Many Americans, with good cause, didn’t believe us when we said we would secure our borders, and so we failed in our efforts. We must prove to them that we can and will secure our borders first, while respecting the dignity and rights of citizens and legal residents of the United States of America.” [E.A.]

Byron York is impressed. I hate to be picky, but even if you think McCain actually believes his constantly-shifting formal position, the statement remains ambiguous. Is McCain saying he first must actually secure the borders or that he first must prove to the voters that he can secure the borders? I don’t think it’s crazy to believe the second interpretation is the correct one–or at least that McCain’s drafters left it open to potentially give him wiggle room later (i.e., “We wouldn’t be passing this historic comprehensive reform today, with the help of my Democratic friends, if we hadn’t convinced the voters that we can and will secure the borders.”)

No one should trust McCain.  Remember what Vanity Fair quoted him as saying:

Then he added, unable to help himself, “By the way, I think the fence is least effective. But I’ll build the goddamned fence if they want it.”

What that means is he doesn’t care–he’s just going to tell voters what he thinks they want to hear.

Steven Levitt’s Freakonomics column points to a working paper, Speech Patterns and Racial Wage Inequality, by a U. of Chicago researcher who collected audio samples recorded recently of 402 participants in the 1997 National Longitudinal Study of Youth cohort (The Bell Curve was based on the earlier 1979 NLSY cohort). Jeffrey Grogger had five grad students guess whether each interviewee was white or black.

Among whites, 82% were said to be white by at least four of the five listeners. Grogger calls these the “distinctly white” group. The other 18% were grouped as “indistinctly white.” (“Indistinctly White” reminds me of Onion Opinion essayist Amber Richardson, author of “Why Somebody Always Around Everytime I Drop my Baby?“)

Among blacks, 67% were “distinctly black.” Grogger has the U.S. Military’s ASVAB scores for all NLSY participants (although of the 10 ASVAB subtests, the most interesting are the four that make up the very IQ-like AFQT, but he doesn’t report those). Converted by me to a conventional IQ scale with the national average at 100 and a standard deviation of 15, here are the ASVAB scores:

Grogger writes:

The final column indicates that the mean ASVAB score for blacks is 0.85 standard deviations lower than the mean for whites. This is similar to the racial differences that appear in many standardized tests (Jencks and Phillips, 1998).

Indistinctly identified whites score 0.16 standard deviations lower on the ASVAB than distinctly identified whites. The difference is greater for blacks. Distinctly identified blacks score .66 standard deviations lower than indistinctly identified blacks. It should come as little surprise that test scores differ between distinctly and indistinctly identified blacks, since test scores factored into the definition of the two groups.

What is surprising is the magnitude of the difference. To put it in perspective, the gap between distinctly and indistinctly identified blacks amounts to three quarters of the gap that exists between blacks and whites.

Similarly large differences appear in years of schooling. Mean highest grade completed among indistinctly identified whites is 12.49 years, compared to 13.22 years among distinctly identified whites. Again, the gap is larger for blacks. The difference in mean highest grade completed between distinctly and indistinctly identified blacks is 0.9 years. This is larger than the gap of 0.83 years between blacks and whites overall.

Keep in mind that the respondents are in their early to mid-20s, so many haven’t finished schooling.

Table 7 presents the relationship between speech patterns and ASVAB scores somewhat differently. For each quartile of the ASVAB distribution (within the speech sample), it presents by race the share of speakers whose race was distinctly identified by listeners. The first column shows that the link between speech patterns and ASVAB scores is quite weak for whites. With the exception of the lowest ASVAB quartile, 81 to 84 percent of whites were distinctly identified as white. In contrast, the link between speech patterns and ASVAB scores is quite strong among blacks. In the lowest quartile, 82 percent of black speakers were distinctly identified. That share declines monotonically by quartile to a low of 25 percent among those at the top.

There are only 8 blacks in the top quartile of ASVAB scorers, but 6 of them didn’t sound distinctly black. In contrast, of the 45 blacks in the bottom quartile of test scores, only 8 of them didn’t sound distinctly black.

Together, Tables 6 and 7 show that skill and speech patterns are highly correlated among black speakers. At the same time, the correlations among white speakers are much weaker.

Levitt writes:

His main finding: blacks who “sound black” earn salaries that are 10 percent lower than blacks who do not “sound black,” even after controlling for measures of intelligence, experience in the work force, and other factors that influence how much people earn. (For what it is worth, whites who “sound black” earn 6 percent lower than other whites.) …

In other words, Grogger has already adjusted for the big IQ gap between distinctly black and indistinctly black panelists, and there’s still a wage gap.

(It turns out you don’t want to sound southern, either. Although pretty imprecisely estimated, it is almost as bad for your wages to sound southern as it is to sound black, even controlling for whether you live in the south.)

Unfortunately, Grogger appears to be lumping white and black Southerners together, which isn’t that helpful.

And no, he doesn’t tell us what the average IQ of whites who sound Southern is. I noticed when I was at Rice U. in Houston that a couple of my classmates had siblings attending local colleges who sounded much more Texan than they did.

Whether black or Southern, it’s part of the homeboy phenomenon. Using a neutral national accent suggests you are willing to do what it takes to get ahead in this country, while using a subgroup accent suggests you are loyal to the values of your neighborhood and aren’t as willing to make sacrifices.

Time Magazine has an article on how John McCain, no surprise, loves to roll the dice in casinos, while Barack Obama played poker every Wednesday night in Springfield with other legislators and lobbyists. Most nights Obama won.

In fact, that would have to be just about my number one tip on how to win at gambling: Be a state legislator and play poker against lobbyists.