LAROUCHE CAMPAIGN

D.C.'s Primary Becomes
Critical National Test

Only three weeks after Lyndon LaRouche's Oct. 22 Presidential webcast from Washington, D.C., that city's first-ever Presidential primary was turning into a decisive battle of the 2004 campaign, and a field of escalation of the strategic battle, LaRouche vs. Cheney, for the fate of the United States right now. From Nov. 12 onward, the District became a central focus of the mobilization of the LaRouche Youth Movement, with the mass distribution and broadcasting of LaRouche's "radio actuality" on the deepening "Cheney-gate" scandal which threatens the White House. But the candidate had also announced, in that Oct. 22 webcast, decisive actions he will take in his first hours of office as President, on health care and military policy, which are critical for the District of Columbia, as for the nation as a whole.

These escalations occurred because of simultaneous strategic blunders by both Vice President Dick Cheney and his faction, and by the Democratic National Committee (DNC), which has acted as a de facto "Cheney protection racket," rendering all Democratic campaign criticisms of Cheney's war policy impotent by directing them against his puppet, President George W. Bush. The Cheney backers' desperate and dangerous move was the Nov. 7 shut-down of the Senate Select Intelligence Committee, carried out by Majority Leader William Frist (R-Tenn.) to "save Cheney's neck" from that Committee's investigation, as LaRouche put it in his radio statement (for full story and consequences, see page 68 above).

At the same time the DNC's venal and feckless national chairman, Terry McAuliffe, made another move suicidal for the Democratic Party, ordering its Presidential candidates to remove their names from Washington, D.C.'s Jan. 13 primary election ballot. McAuliffe was attempting, in hallmark racist fashion, to torpedo the new District primary completely, simply because it would precede the traditionally first-in-the-nation New Hampshire primary, and because its non-binding vote would be an expression for Washington's mostly African-American voters, whose representatives have no vote in Congress.

DNC Treachery

Five Democratic Presidential candidates—Sens. Joe Lieberman, John Kerry, and John Edwards, Gen. Wesley Clark (ret.), and Rep. Dick Gephardt—foolishly complied with the DNC's command and withdrew from the District primary. The action was denounced as "gutless" by D.C. Councilman Jack Evans, the author of the D.C. primary legislation.

That left Howard Dean and Lyndon LaRouche contesting in the nation's capital, along with Rep. Dennis Kucinich, Carol Moseley-Braun, and Rev. Al Sharpton. As of Nov. 12, with the District's Democratic Party and elected officials insulted by the DNC and its heavy-handed move backfiring, McAuliffe was reportedly preparing another move, to try to put the five withdrawn candidates back on the ballot. The DNC—which has done everything, including arguing the unconstitutionality of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, to keep Lyndon LaRouche out of candidates' debates and off ballots—feared a showdown in D.C. between Dean and LaRouche, who were first and second among all candidates in total number of campaign contributors nation-wide, through the end of October.

For the District's voters, both as citizens of the depression-wracked United States and as residents of the nation's capital, voting and mobilizing for LaRouche in the Jan. 13 primary is a critical opportunity to change national policies. First, the candidate is leading the drive to get Cheney out of office and end the insane war policy. Second, in LaRouche's Oct. 22 webcast, he announced that in his first hour in the White House, he would reopen the wrongly shut-down D.C. General Hospital as a full-service hospital. He will immediately move to get repeal of the law enabling Health Maintenance Organizations (HMOs), enacted in 1974 under Richard Nixon, and instead restore a health-care policy based on the 1946 Hill-Burton Act, which ensured funding and planning for adequate levels of hospital and clinic beds and staffing in every county in the United States.

Howard Dean, on the other hand—a banker, and a medical doctor but one who has never practiced—has long been, and still is, an advocate of putting Americans into HMOs, notorious for restricting their medical care.

As of now, because of the shut-down of the highly-ranked public D.C. General Hospital in 2001, under an HMO strategy imposed on the city, the entire Southeast quadrant of Washington has only one hospital, which is bankrupt and on the verge of closing.

As LaRouche put it in his radio statement, "Of course, also, as you all know, I am insisting on restoring the D.C. General Hospital, as a full-service public hospital, in its former form. And at the same time, of course, reversing the present HMO health policy, back into a Hill-Burton-type policy—an issue on which I have a fundamental difference with Dr. Dean, who is for, in his own terms, the HMO policy."

Speaking on a Missouri radio talk show Nov. 7, Lyndon LaRouche declared that he is the "unnamed" Democrat who can beat President Bush in 2004. LaRouche was referring to a recent poll showing that all of his so-called rivals for the Democratic Party Presidential nomination, running against Bush, would lose; but that an "unnamed" Democrat could beat Bush. LaRouche dismissed speculation that Hillary Clinton was the "unnamed candidate," pointing out that her ambitions extend no further than becoming a Vice Presidential candidate in a hung Democratic Party nominating convention, a strategy which assumes a Democratic defeat in November.

Youths' Series of Victories

LaRouche's remarks capped a week in which his campaign moved from strength to strength, beginning with the Nov. 3 decision by the Secretary of State of California to place LaRouche's name on the California ballot. California Secretary of State Kevin Shelley selected LaRouche as a nationally "generally recognized" candidate. LaRouche had previously been certified for the Feb. 3 Democratic primary ballot in Missouri, despite a last minute DNC-directed effort to refuse his submission.

The California certification was followed by a smashing victory in the Nov. 4 Philadelphia Mayoral race, where the deployment of the LaRouche Youth Movement secured a massive margin for incumbent Mayor John Street, who was under attack from Attorney General John Ashcroft's Gestapo-like Justice Department. Then, on Nov. 7, LaRouche was certified for the Jan. 13 primary ballot by the D.C. Board of Elections.

LaRouche has the only campaign with a significant youth movement, and with demonstrated broad support among the lower 80% of income brackets in the American population. Washington, D.C. is a hotbed of organizing by the LaRouche Youth Movement, which has carried the campaign to unseat war-mongering Vice President Dick Cheney into the streets, as well as into the halls of the U.S. Congress. The campaign has been running ads indicting Cheney on D.C.'s largest news-radio station, WTOP, for months.

As the LaRouche Youth Movement in the nation's capital geared up its mobilization for "Cheney-gate" and for the upcoming Presidential primary contest, the candidate in mid-November toured New England—with appearances in New Hampshire, Vermont, and Massachusetts—and the Midwest, with appearances in Michigan and Missouri the week of Nov. 16.

New England Echo of Washington Mobilization

All of the New Hampshire press, in covering LaRouche's Nov. 12 press conference in the state capital of Concord, where he filed his candidacy for that state's primary, emphasized that as he addressed supporters there, his LaRouche Youth Movement was launching mass distribution of the "Dump Cheney Now"leaflets in the nation's capital, Washington. "LaRouche, who had raised $5.7 million through Sept. 30," reported the Concord Monitor, "printed 1 million copies of the flier, urging the Vice President to step down now, rather than lead the country on what he called an inevitable march to war."

Two dozen media representatives and others gathered to hear LaRouche at his filing press conference; about 100 students attended his campaign speech the next morning at Plymouth College, which has held forums for several of the Democratic candidates; and he was to speak at Middlebury College in Vermont the evening of Nov. 14, invited by both campus Democrats and Republicans and several state representatives.

At the Concord press conference, the candidate was introduced by veteran Democratic State Rep. Barbara Richardson, who said his ideas—she particularly emphasized his New Bretton Woods monetary reform to restart the world's economies—and his campaign's broad financial support should place him in every Presidential debate and primary context. LaRouche, besides focussing on removing Cheney as the key change, addressed three main topics: how to prevent the Iraq war from spreading worldwide; how to remake a "world financial-monetary system in the last phases of disintegration"; and how to spread ideas to mobilize the youth of America, to re-organize their reality-averse Baby Boomer parents.

In New Hampshire and Vermont, as he does in his Washington radio statement and mass leaflets, LaRouche emphasized that polls are showing American voters would like to vote for "a Democrat" against President George W. Bush next year—an FDR Democratic, as LaRouche insists—but that each of his nine "official" Democratic rivals trails far behind the President in one-on-one surveys. LaRouche said that he, the sole Democratic leader in the tradition of Franklin D. Roosevelt's response to the last economic Depression, is "the unnamed candidate" who can beat Bush. "Now is the time for a New Hampshire native to be President, one newspaper quoted him. Referring to the other candidates as "losers," LaRouche asked, "Would you put a cripple on the football field as your quarterback?"

"LaRouche Rallies Youth Vote," headlined the Nashua Telegraph). "LaRouche Hits Bush, Cheney, Democrats," was the Mancheste r Union-Leader headline. The Concord Monitor noted that "if LaRouche is well-known anywhere, it is on the college campuses ... where his supporters set up tables and hand out LaRouche literature, like the latest edition of Children of Satan"—referring to LaRouche's world-famous exposé of the Cheney-Wolfowitz cabal as Straussian liars. The newspaper interviewed one LaRouche Youth Movement (LYM) member from New Hampshire, whose brother—a university student in New York State—is also in the LYM. He described how a mobilization of the LYM had just victoriously turned the Nov. 4 Philadelphia mayoral election into a "national"defeat for Attorney General John Ashcroft, who tried to witchhunt Mayor John Street. Street called in the LYM and won in a landslide.

Rep. Richardson noted the LYM's previous victory in California, where, while the state's voters as a whole bought the Recall hoax and voted in "beast-man" Arnold Schwarzenegger, a strong LYM mobilization shifted the Los Angeles area dramatically such that the Recall was unexpectedly defeated in Los Angeles County. She also cited LaRouche's campaign to save D.C. General Hospital in 200-2001, and his vow to restore it immediately as President. Richardson commented that she has not been at a Concord press conference at the Legislative Office Building attended by so many press. LaRouche interviews also ran on WMUR-TV channel 9, and on the area's National Public Radio affiliate.

LaRouche was to speak in Boston on Nov. 15, then travel from New England to the Midwest for major campaign events in St. Louis, Missouri and Detroit, Michigan, both sponsored by Democrats in the legislatures of those states.

Overall, it was a bad political week for Dick Cheney and his neo-conservative cabal controlling the Bush Administration, and another bad week for the Democratic National Committee faction which has been leading the Democrats into oblivion.