Announcement of presidential candidacy:
The Time Has Come
The following was issued by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr. on July 18, 1997.
A persisting downward trend in national leadership, since approximately May 1996, prompted me to announce my intention to campaign for the year 2000 Democratic Party presidential nomination.
During the early Spring of 1996, I saw hopeful signs of collaboration of the Clinton Presidency with both outstanding leaders of the Democratic Party, especially in the Senate, and with a revitalized movement of organized labor and other important constituencies. That collaboration collapsed with the President's capitulation to pressures from a circle including Roy M. Cohn's cousin, and political clone, Richard Morris. The capitulation to the demand that the President not veto the pending welfare reform bill, sent the Democratic congressional campaigns down to overall defeat in the November general election, and sent the nation itself on a spiralling downward political course.
Under the conditions that Vice-President Al Gore clung to his present ideological orientation, and under the condition that Clinton remained increasingly mortgaged to the dictates of a prospective Gore presidential candidacy for the year 2000, a situation would exist which could assure an incalculable catastrophe for this republic even many months before the year 2000 arrived.
Gore's candidacy as such, is not the issue. As a practical matter, the evidence is, that it is impossible that Gore could be elected in 2000, whether any Democratic candidate opposes him, or not. The issue is, the effect of allowing the Clinton Presidency to remain increasingly mortgaged to Gore's future candidacy during the period leading into the 1998 congressional elections, and beyond.
The problem is, that the presently onrushing global financial and monetary crises will require the President to make certain kinds of decisions, as the leading statesman of today's planet, which he could not make if he were too closely wedded to Vice-President Gore's utopian agenda. The future of this nation will probably be determined by the choice of decisions, or non-decisions, which the President faces long before the year 2000 arrives.
Additionally, the tacit assumption, that the ``succession'' within the Democratic Party is a settled matter, stifles discussion of policy precisely at the moment that the most vigorous possible discussion has become a life-or-death matter of choices for this republic. As patriots, we must state candidly, that although the Democratic Party has crippling internal defects at this time, the Republican Party's internal situation is presently far worse. Thus, warts and all, whether the U.S.A. emerges safely from the financial and monetary tornadoes which are now approaching virtually every market on the planet, will depend upon the quality of bi-partisan crisis-leadership rallied around President Bill Clinton.
In contrast to the state of affairs as recently as Spring 1996, there is virtually no capital of any leading nation, in any part of the world, which would deny the warnings of financial crisis which I delivered at the close of 1995, and during the Winter-Spring 1996 phase of my Democratic presidential pre-candidacy. There is no significant leader of the financial world, who does not presently know, that the worst financial crises of the Twentieth Century are bearing down upon the world's financial centers now. There is, however, no clear consensus on what action must be taken, even among a majority of those leaders.
Therefore, I must intervene in this situation, to break up the present Hamlet-like pattern of worsening indecision in our nation's capital, and in the Democratic Party. It is President Clinton who will be called upon, repeatedly, years and months before the 2000 primary campaigns, to provide paramount world leadership in this presently worsening global crisis; however, his ability to provide competent leadership depends upon breaking up the present trends around his administration, and in the Congress generally. He must be freed to make competent decisions, without disabling political encumbrances.
My outstanding expertise on the economic issues, is thoroughly documented, and is beyond doubt among competent and reasonable men and women familiar with the facts. For the rest, although I did not plan it that way, the July 25 edition of EIR contains a feature, entitled ``The Case of the Inedible Professor,'' which can be examined as implicitly the platform upon which my candidacy relies.
