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For all their pleas for a return to morality in national life, Congressional Club operatives conduct campaigns that flirt constantly with the unethical practice and the unfair charge. The club and its chairman, Tom Ellis, the Raleigh lawyer who is Helms' most powerful adviser, last year ran their own candidate for Senate in the person of North Carolina's John East, the wheelchair-bound conservative known in Washington as "Helms on wheels." East used club personnel as his campaign staff, club mailing lists for fund raising and Jefferson Marketing Inc., a production company created by the club, to produce his television ads.
The East effort was a successful example of the negative campaign genre. Incumbent Democrat Robert Morgan was portrayed as a man who had "been taken in by the ultra-left-wing McGovern liberals in the U.S. Senate." In fact, Morgan was among the most conservative Democrats in the Senate. East's ads charged that Morgan had voted "to scrap the B-1 bomber." Morgan, in a 39-page postcampaign rebuttal to the East ads, said he had voted twice for the B1, voting against only the last-ditch effort to build five prototypes as a bailout for the manufacturer.
In the last week of the campaign, East's television ads charged Morgan with voting to give 13,000 textile jobs to Communist China, an allegation based on his vote to grant the Chinese most-favored-nation trade status. Morgan says his analysis showed that the vote would actually increase markets for North Carolina goods, but he lacked the funds to counter the assault. "How do you fight this?" Morgan asks. "All you can do is to mitigate the damage until their excesses catch up with them."
The club is careful to protect the Helms base in North Carolina. Using the money raised by appeals to support Reagan's budget, the club spent $200,000 last spring to oppose a gas tax increase sought by Democratic Governor James Hunt, a possible contender for Helms' Senate seat in 1984. The campaign was aimed at Hunt directly, not at the legislature, which had to pass his proposed measure. Club Treasurer Carter Wrenn says the club will also target some North Carolina Democratic Congressmen in next year's elections.
With expensive legal advice from the Washington law firm of Covington and Burling, the club adheres scrupulously to federal campaign-spending laws. But its Jefferson Marketing offshoot is a private, for-profit firm and is thus not required to report how it spends money paid it by the Congressional Club. (A group disbanded last month called the Campaign Committee, which had provided workers for the political campaigns, had similar status.) That makes a detailed examination of the club's activities impossible.
Indeed, the Helms machine's freedom from the constraints of money, state lines and party labels troubles many professional politicians. Insists Tom Ellis: "We are a bridge between conservative Democrats and conservative Republicans. I would like to see a realignment under the Republican banner, but it wouldn't bother me to change the name. In the real world, it may be that all we can do is realign the Republican Party." Helms and his money club have already done that in North Carolina. —By John F. Stacks