This article appears in the February 5, 2016 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.

Creating the Next Presidency

by Robert Ingraham

[PDF version of this article]

Feb. 1—As Lyndon LaRouche has made clear, the nomination of either Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders by the Democratic Party for the office of U.S. President would be an unparalleled disaster for both the nation and the Democratic Party itself. In an article which accompanies this piece, overwhelming evidence is presented which fleshes out the particulars for Mr. LaRouche’s analysis. Whatever her intention might have been during her 2008 campaign for the Presidency, since 2009 Hillary Clinton has sold her soul to Barack Obama. She was personally complicit in many of the crimes of the Obama Administration and remains fiercely subservient to Obama to this day.

Bernie Sanders has repeatedly demonstrated that he is a “non-serious” candidate, a person who is big on talk and short on courage, and whose convictions run a mile wide and an inch deep. He remains an untrustworthy opportunist. At the same time, both Clinton and Sanders are disliked and mistrusted by tens of millions of Americans, and the undeniable reality is that they are both unelectable in the nationwide general election. The nomination of either of them would almost guarantee a Republican Party victory in November, which given the current state of that Party’s prospective list of candidates would be a calamity both for the nation and for the entire world. Both Clinton and Sanders must be exposed, discredited, and driven out of the Presidential race as rapidly as possible.

O’Malley campaigning for the Democratic nomination for President, 2015.

As for Martin O’Malley, Matthew Ogden’s presentation in the Jan. 29, 2016 LaRouche PAC National Webcast demonstrated the irrefutable, critically important differences, and the huge moral gulf, which separates O’Malley from both Clinton and Sanders. As Ogden reports, even before the official announcement of his campaign, Martin O’Malley defined the intention behind his decision to run in a guest editorial in the Des Moines Register on March 19, 2015. In that article O’Malley stated that “It is time to put the national interest before the interests of Wall Street,” and he called for the immediate re-enactment of Franklin Roosevelt’s Glass-Steagall legislation. He repeated these themes in the official announcement of his candidacy on May 30, 2015, and as Ogden points out, in the ensuing months O’Malley earned the reputation of Wall Street’s “Public Enemy #1.”

The issue before the American people is not simply to compare O’Malley, Clinton, and Sanders with each other. The more important truth to be grasped is that we are now facing a breakdown crisis, which threatens economic ruin, chaos, war, and the destruction of the population. As most Americans already sense, we are in a grave crisis, and there is no possibility of escaping this crisis under the current state of affairs. The creation of a new Constitutional Presidency, as the Office of the President was understood by Alexander Hamilton, Abraham Lincoln, and Franklin Roosevelt, is the uniquely required action necessary to overcome the current crisis and avoid a very bleak future.

That potential for a better future exists as a possible future within the O’Malley campaign and within Martin O’Malley himself. But there are certain things which should be said—and certain lessons from American history which should be noted—at this time.

The Presidency

The office of the U.S. President was created by Alexander Hamilton and his ally Gouverneur Morris at the 1787 Philadelphia Constitutional Convention. Against overwhelming opposition, particularly from the slave states of the South, Hamilton and Morris created a President-led government, one with strong executive powers. Eyewitness reports from that time, as well as statements from Hamilton and Morris themselves, reveal that, of all the issues fought over at the Convention, Hamilton judged the issue of a “Presidential System” to be the most critical, the most indispensable, upon which the viability of the new Republic absolutely rested.

At the same time, Hamilton and Morris were also responsible for authoring the Constitution’s Preamble and the inclusion of that Preamble in the final document. It is very clear that, in their creation of the Presidency, it was the intent of Hamilton and Morris to establish an office which would become the guardian of the principles defined in the Preamble, which would embody the historic mission of that Preamble within the person of the President. In other words, the Office of the Presidency was intended to personify the intent of the Constitution and to establish a sacred trust between the President and the people, whereby the President was duty-bound to defend the Constitution and the Republic, and to act on behalf of the people and the nation as a whole.

That is exactly what was accomplished in the first Washington Administration from 1789 to 1793, including most critically the drafting of Alexander Hamilton’s Four Reports—commissioned by President Washington—which established an economic system based on the future-oriented physical economic development of the nation, that is, a national Credit System under the sovereign direction of the Nation, as opposed to control by Wall Street speculators such as Aaron Burr.

The American Presidency is an Idea, a Principle, a Mission, oriented toward the future development of the people.1 The few truly great Presidents in American history have been those who have adopted that mission.

Fighting to Win

As this article goes to press, it is certain that many power brokers in the leadership of the Democratic Party and the news media are telling O’Malley that he “can’t win.” Perhaps some within the O’Malley camp itself are “crunching the numbers” and concluding that neither the money nor the institutional support is there to successfully contest for the nomination.

In truth, it is Clinton and Sanders who are unelectable, and any hesitation on the part of O’Malley to go all out for the nomination, although perhaps understandable under the circumstances, would be a serious error. Here, again, let us turn to American history.

Harper’s Weekly/Mathew Brady Abraham Lincoln on Feb. 27, 1860, the day of his Cooper Union speech.

In 1860 when Abraham Lincoln went into the national Republican Party convention, he was considered by all to be the weakest of the four contenders. No one in the Republican Party leadership expected him to be nominated. Republican Party leaders were lined up behind the two front-runners, William Seward and Salmon Chase. However, Lincoln had already defined a clear national mission for his campaign with his Cooper Union speech (more below), and at the convention his campaign workers labored tirelessly to convince the delegates that neither Seward nor Chase could win in the general election. They made the point that Lincoln was the one candidate who could win. What seemed impossible became a reality, and Lincoln was nominated on the third ballot.

In January of 1932 Franklin Roosevelt, although he enjoyed a good deal of popular support, was considered a dark horse for the Democratic nomination. Political experts expected the nomination to go once again to Al Smith, the friend of Wall Street and the 1928 nominee. When the Democratic Party convention convened in June, the entirety of the Democratic Party leadership lined up against Roosevelt. Composed primarily of Wall Street allies, these Democratic Party power-brokers bitterly fought Roosevelt’s nomination. But earlier that year, with his Forgotten Man Speech (again, more below), Roosevelt had defined a singular mission against the pro-Wall Street Democratic Party leadership. After a fierce convention fight, he was nominated on the fourth ballot.

Defining the Mission

To return to Alexander Hamilton’s intention for the Presidency—to embody a unified mission to defend the people, the Constitution, and the future development of the nation—it is useful again to consider Lincoln and Roosevelt.

On Feb 27, 1860, Abraham Lincoln delivered his Cooper Union Speech in New York City. It was that speech which placed Lincoln at center stage as a national leader. In his remarks, Lincoln was unflinching in his commitment to stop the spread of slavery, to defend the Union, and to save the Republic. This became the mission of his campaign and, as we know today, this mission defined his 1861-1865 Presidency. This was not about “practical politics.” Lincoln’s address inhabited the realm of moral understanding from which he never departed.

Franklin Roosevelt campaigns for the Presidency in 1932.

On April 7, 1932, speaking from Albany, New York, Franklin Roosevelt delivered his famous speech, The Forgotten Man. It was this speech, and the personal commitment of Roosevelt to the Principle defined in the speech, which propelled him to become a leading contender for the nomination. FDR promised to take on Wall Street and to defend the people of the nation. He kept his promise, and he never betrayed the American people.

It is worth noting that the principled approach taken by both Lincoln and Roosevelt, far from producing narrow or sectarian campaigns, succeeded in rallying and uniting large numbers of people, across party lines, in enthusiastic support for the candidate’s efforts to save the nation. Democrats, Free-Soilers, Know-Nothings, and old Whigs enlisted in Lincoln’s cause. In Roosevelt’s case, droves of leading Republicans abandoned Herbert Hoover to join with FDR in his fight for the Forgotten Man against Wall Street. When, in 1933, Roosevelt announced his cabinet appointees, several of the leading members, including Henry Wallace and Harold Ickes, were registered Republicans who had joined with him in the fight against Wall Street.

When Lyndon LaRouche advises Martin O’Malley to “stick to the subject,” to concentrate on the demand to shut down Wall Street and re-enact Glass-Steagall, this is not simply “practical political advice.” What LaRouche is really urging O’Malley to do is what Lincoln did at the Cooper Union in 1860 and what FDR did in Albany in 1932. The people of America are being destroyed. For 15 years, under Bush and Obama, a London/Wall Street financial dictatorship has brought us to the point of ruin. O’Malley must commit himself, without hesitation, to rescuing the nation. Wall Street must be shut down. If O’Malley sticks to that mission, and if he rallies the American people to that mission, the people will respond.