It hit me while I was doing some research on Republican Senator Saxby Chambliss in advance of next week's run-off election in Georgia. Chambliss is now the ranking member of the Senate Agriculture Committee, as well as a staunch opponent of immigration and a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee.
Wow, I thought to myself. This guy is just like Jesse Helms.
And apparently, I wasn't the first to make the analogy. I stumbled across an excellent article from 2002, when The Nation's Jason Vest compared Chambliss to Jesse Helms.