Helms' responses to the attacks are testament to the powers of the incumbency. President Reagan, Vice President George Bush, half-a-dozen Reagan cabinet members and more than 33 U.S. senators have stumped in North Carolina on Helms' behalf. Most recently, in a highly controversial move, 22 U.S. ambassadors endorsed Helms' candidacy.
The state's 3.3 million registered voters must make an important decision this year: it is both a referendum on the Reagan presidency and a choice between, as one observer put it, "the progressivism and pragmatism of a New South" and "the pride and prejudices of the Old South."
But North Carolinians will not be the only ones to feel the effects of this election's outcome. Now, Carolina's Senate race is truly a national Senate race, explains Hodding Carter III, chief correspondent of Public Television's Inside Story, a news-magazine that scrutinizes the media.
"Happily, it's a timeless morality play that you can cast according to your own definition of good and evil," Carter, a former State Department spokesman, says of the race. "But no matter who wins, Lucifer or the Angel, the battle will go on."
With Republican control of the Senate at issue and with Helms playing a key role in the ultra-conservative movement, a Hunt victory could strike a death-blow to the New Right. Thus, the stakes are high and the ultraconservatives have mobilized behind Helms.
For example, The Southern Baptist Advocate, a nationally distributed magazine published in Texas, says in support of Helms: "In North Carolina, it is a clear cut choice between those who stand on one side of moral issues and those who stand on the other."
On the campaign trail, Helms, a devout Southern Baptist, often hints at a divine mandate for his re-election.
In a rally at a recent Moose Lodge meeting in Durham, N.C., Helms recalled how in 1983 he narrowly missed being on Korean Airlines Flight 007. Helms said he chose to attend a Texas fund-raising event thrown by Dallas Cowboys coach Tom Landry, and therefore cancelled his booking on the jumbo jet that was shot down by the Soviet Union.
"Say it's just an accident," Helms said. "I don't believe it. I believe that fella upstairs has got one more thing he wants me to do."
When asked later if he meant that God has a special interest in his candidacy, Helms answered: "Oh, bull. I'm not going to get into which side God is on."
Hunt, a Presbyterian, is quick to attack Helms for his positions on school prayer and abortion. "I believe in school prayer," the governor says. "But it can't be voluntary if it's authorized by public officials. I don't want Jesse Helms to write a prayer that my kids have to say in schools.
"My opponent and fundamentalists are trying to dictate what the political agenda will be, what the Christian position is," Hunt says, adding that important issues "such as food for the hungry, a superb education for every child and keeping the peace" are thus excluded from the Helms' list of priorities.
North Carolinians are not quite sure what to make of their celebrated Senate race. Public opinion polls show that the number of undecided voters has actually increased in the last few months. Many experts attribute the rise to a growing alienation among the state's voters--disenchantment, they say, with hard-ball, hard-sell tactics the candidates have used in their war over the airwaves.
Dirty politics are by no means new to North Carolina. In 1950, voters were treated to a rough-and-tumble slugfest between Willis Smith and Frank Porter Graham. Smith, the Republican candidate, doctored photographs to show Graham's wife purportedly dancing with a black man. Red-baiting was rampant. And a young man named Jesse Helms, it is alleged, was intimately involved in Smith's negative propoganda campaign.
Little has changed in the last 34 years. The tactics are more subtle, but the underlying issues are still present. Claude A. Allen, a spokesman for the Helms campaign, recently referred to Hunt's gay supporters as "the queers." And Helms's campaign literature is replete with subtle references to black voter registration and the feminist movement, both "the threats" to the white, male-dominated world of North Carolina's past.
When the Senate debate was over at 8 p.m. on Saturday evening. North Carolina's fairgoers returned their energies to cotton candy, corn dogs and ferris wheels.
Perhaps somewhere echoing in the minds of the fairgoers was Governor Hunt's sad comment in the closing moments of the final debate:
"After all you've seen, maybe you wish that you didn't have to vote for either one of us, and you don't have to. But one of us is going to win, and therefore we hope very much that you'll continue to study it, think about it and let's all do our very best."
"...its a timeless morality play that you can cast according to your own definition of good and evil. But no matter who wins, Lucifer or the Angel, the battle will go on." --Hodding Carter