PRESS RELEASE
WHY `LAROUCHE IN 2004' WAS INDISPENSABLE
Had I Not Been Excluded
by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.September 11, 2004
As I wrote on the subject of "How to Campaign for Kerry," earlier today, the fact that the Democratic Party is under such campaign pressure for the coming weeks, is reflected now in the still mentally deadening effects of what is typified by the "Shrum factor" over the entirety of the primary campaign since the New Hampshire primary. Had I not been excluded from the campaign debates, the issues which I was addressing during the period prior to the July Convention would have already been aired to a broader population over the preceding six months.
The importance of that lies not in the substantial primary vote I would have accumulated. In light of the hatred fostered against me by certain currents even within the Party, Kerry would have probably won the nomination, anyway. The most important difference, now, is that the general population was left ill-prepared by the Kerry election-campaign, by the failure to digest the strategic issues which were already the central feature of my primary campaign.
Now, therefore, we must make up, very quickly, for about six months of opportunity more or less frivolously cast away.
1. Kerry As the Candidate
Kerry's primary campaigning was at its relative best in New Hampshire, where he tended to respond to the environment of my campaign, unlike the later parts of the primary campaign. If one thinks back about the pluses and minuses of his campaign so far, one sees two things, foremost.
First, the deadening tendency to bore the sections of the constituency, a constituency which must be brought into the Party's support from outside the category of so-called "voters in three of the last four Federal campaigns." Call that deadening feature of Kerry's campaigning then "the Bob Shrum factor"; it was not all Shrum's fault, but the comparison with the fatal flaws of the 2000 Al Gore campaign, which failed to win the electoral-vote majority in Arkansas, prior to the re-re-counting of the Florida vote, points to the paradigmatic significance of the notoriously funereal implications of Shrum's role in numerous winnable campaigns which went down to defeat under his influence.
Second, the weaknesses of Kerry's campaigning, even today. Kerry shows himself, at his best, as his military record shows the development of his personal talent and courage, his admirable personal qualities lacking in de facto draft-evaders Bush and Cheney, as a military leader in the field. Where he has yet to show mettle now, is as the prospective commander in chief who must not "fudge" on a direct, clear, and forceful kind of hubris, on the kind of leadership in political combat we might expect of a Douglas MacArthur in the work of lonely ultimate responsibility for the crucial initiatives demanded for command of a theater. He counterpunches very well on secondary issues, when he is not constrained against doing so by misadvisors such as Shrum; it has been want of pungently expressed, sharply focussed strategic initiatives, with deep-cutting knife-edge quality of irreversible commitment without hedges, like that of MacArthur's Inchon flanking operation, where Kerry's arguments have tended to be defused into multifariousness, which are therefore lacking in effective campaign "punch."
My estimate of Kerry is, that with the right team of top advisors—not some crew cooked up by a Washington, D.C. law firm, a crew largely drawn from selected senior veterans of such quarters as our flag officers, sharp-minded leading diplomats, straight-thinking, thoroughly battle-tested senior intelligence officers, and a comparable selection from among the ranks of present and former Congressmen and academic specialists—we would provide a Kerry Presidency with a crew drawn from bi-partisan ranks, as able, or even better pre-qualified, as a team, for a time of grave crisis than that around President Franklin Roosevelt. There are obvious options for "parking" such a readily available team in various spots in or around a Kerry Presidency as a whole.
Additionally, Kerry's own experience in matters of foreign affairs qualifies him as with a good working "feel," utterly lacking in the present Bush Administration, provided he were suitably advised in the systemic features of the strategic side of matters of foreign affairs, including those where my own uniquely special sort of hands-on experience would serve as a contributing additional quality of factor for supporting the new Administration's strategic competence in ways which have been worse than utterly lacking in the present, bungling, ham-fisted style of the often mindlessly impulsive Bush Administration.
Such a team of specially privileged, highly qualified advisors, whether situated nominally in Cabinet positions, the National Security Council, or elsewhere, would give a new President who shares Kerry's extensive Senate experience, the kind of actual and perceived broad base of support and public acceptance he needs for the circumstances of virtually unprecedented and sudden global crises which already are onrushing at this time.
A good package means a good Kerry Presidency from which, in net effect, virtually nothing essential need be lacking.
Without such a new, gentler, but yet firmer Presidency of such included strength and moral intellectual authority, the danger would be a tendency toward mechanical dictatorial exercises in arbitrary willfulness, rather than confident leadership which guides the people toward safety in a voluntary way, that rather than the kind of quasi-dictatorial to fully dictatorial arbitrariness of an Orwellian "Big Brother" which Cheney et al. have cut out for the Bush Administration by aid of the impact of horror projected by the 9/11 attack. The result of such changes in the composition of the Presidency would be a Presidency gentler but more forcefully effective than the assortment of brutish louts who dominate the current Bush Administration. It is in this complex that we find the obviously recommendable prospect for situating a still youthful ex-President Bill Clinton in some way which would be in keeping with the institutional dignity of an ex-President, and of immense value to the nation at the kind of juncture we face in years immediately ahead.
The chief problem, is that the pathway to this kind of urgently needed change was greatly impeded by the wasted six months during which there should have been the broadly extended effect, as through the campaign debates, of my catalytic role participating, even seemingly gadfly role, in preparing the Party for the present situation. This was prevented during all those months preceding the Boston convention, by the included role of certain very gloomy recesses of the Justice Department in controlling the Democratic National Committee's expressed attitude toward me at that time. The folly of pretending that a "business-as-usual" transition were an appropriate outlook for the post-conventions interval, where a full-fledged, systemically existential crisis is the reality of the essence of the situation, has left the nation and the election-process into November emotionally and intellectually now greatly under-prepared for the forces about to strike us in a relatively unprecedented way.
We must now hasten to fill that gap.
2. The Character of This Problem Before Us
The relatively amateurish tendencies of even some seasoned campaign advisors, is to assume that the way citizens will vote in November, should be simply adduced from study of currently reported trends in popular opinion. From the standpoint of current trends toward radical change in circumstances affecting the population, reliance on those approaches to opinion-polling verges upon assured failure of the relevant campaigns. We are now in a period of sudden, radical change in circumstances, and consequently in directions of changes in opinion. We are in what historians would report as a revolutionary interval of temporary discontinuity, sometimes sudden and even violent changes in the course of economic and related political and related developments.
By that, we might refer, for one example of this problem, to the evolution of the situation in 1917 Russia, from the end of Czardom to the so-called "October Revolution." The peculiar genius, and so-called "voluntarist" outlook, of V.I. Lenin, in launching the October Revolution, was his foresight into both the way in which the overthrow of Czarism was probably pre-assured by the launching of World War I, and the inherent incompetence of all those relatively influential political currents which might be considered contenders for the formation of a post-Czar government. In effect, these were the circumstances in which Lenin orchestrated the revolutionary establishment of Soviet power even virtually behind the back, and over the resistance of the majority of the leadership of his own Bolshevik Party.
The pre-existing assortment of institutions created a vacuum into which Lenin eagerly marched.
Compare this experience of Russia with the example of the way in which the Hitler dictatorship emerged within several weeks following President Hindenburg's appointment of Hitler as a ministerial Chancellor to replace the anti-Hitler government. At first, German opinion thought Hitler to be a fly-by-night phenomenon; Göring's orchestration of the Reichstag Fire, and the prompt use of that frightening event to enact the dictatorial emergency powers given to Hitler, made World War II in some form virtually inevitable at that point in February 1933.
The whole sweep of history of nations and entire cultures, including our own republic, is characterized by the kinds of intervals of crisis which represent a point of discontinuity in the habits of thought and practice of both institutions and mass opinion.
If, then, a responsible leadership institution is prepared to face the actuality of such a period of discontinuity in trends, as President Franklin Roosevelt saved the U.S. from both going fascist here, and from the threat of fascist tyranny from abroad, then the nation will probably come out strengthened by overcoming that threat, as was the case with us during the 1933-1945 interval preceding that President's death. If that option is not present, then, as in banker Volpi di Misurata's Italy of 1922, or the post-1931 Germany of January 28-30, 1933, the worst result will probably ensue.
The U.S.A. is engulfed, right now, by the onrush of such a systemic form of global monetary-financial crisis. For reasons of the factor of "free will," the timing of a sharp break in the system, a break like that of crossing the sound-barrier, can rarely be timed exactly; however, the range of interval within which the crisis will express itself in the sharpest way, can be broadly estimated as within a relatively narrow time-frame, as today. We are presently in a band of developments comparable to an increasingly turbulent passage from the sub-sonic to supersonic stages of the onrushing world crisis. This is the situation faced by the incoming Presidency, and that therefore defines the preciously limited time to make the kinds of political choices which will predetermine the character of our government's response to the breaking-point in the general monetary-financial collapse onrushing in the world system today.
The impact of this kind of process of transition, as from the 1787 incident of the Queen's necklace, plotted by Martinist cult-member Cagliostro, which led to the London-plotted, Martinist-orchestrated events of July 1789 and beyond in France, is associated with sudden and sweeping, successive changes in beliefs and moods within the population in general. For such a situation with us today, and also with the world at large, today, all customary, linear assumptions respecting political trends, are the self-afflicted addictions of political fools.
In such an interval of crisis, as this which is already gripping our society today, especially in North America and Europe, there are approaches for dealing more or less successfully with the kind of non-linear ideological turbulence now gripping the U.S., in particular, at this juncture. That kind of situation requires an approach which is rooted in deep appreciation of those often still-unconscious, accelerating trends toward change in values which might be expressed on the apparent surface of political and related developments in outlook and moods.
In such a circumstance, effective politics depends upon the capacity and inclination of leading political and related circles to bring into consciousness what is lurking, insurgent within the potential consciousness of various strata among the population and corresponding institutions.
The most essential of these kinds of considerations now, pertains to the underlying issues of direction of change in the physical aspects of the economy. The possibility of rational, rather than recklessly impulsive response to seismic-like shocks in the ongoing social-economic-political process, depends upon reaching agreement between the political leadership and a crucial, broad-based section of the population, on a rational comprehension of the underlying long-term interests of the nation as a whole.
The task so posed is comparable to leadership of a nation which must fight a war, and yet will not win a war which is, like the ongoing warfare in Iraq today, a condition worse than what had been recklessly assumed, over the warnings of the best top-ranking military professionals, to be the justification for going to war in the first place.
In a crisis of such existential import, such as that which the U.S. already faces in the weeks and months ahead, policy-shaping must proceed from the starting-point of a thoroughly crafted "exit strategy," not the kind of reckless decision to go to war whose worsening consequences now confront us as the consequences of our national folly in a.) Afghanistan, b.) Iraq, c.) our rapidly deteriorating foreign relations with Europe and elsewhere, and, d.) the consequences of these thoughtless blunders experienced in the combined costs of yet another useless war and lunatic degree of Bush Administration mismanagement of the U.S. economy itself.
Before beginning a journey, consider both the destination your plan will actually reach, and the hazards along the way. War is never a good impulse-buy, as by an intellectually and emotionally challenged President acting as a virtual puppet of the fraudulent pretexts concocted by a deeply morally challenged Vice-President Cheney and Cheney's own house political "Leporello," Lewis "Scooter" Libby.
We are faced, presently, with a general population whose perception, among various parts, is directly contrary to reaching a destination consistent with our future interest, a population whose perceptions do not yet correspond to any feasible route of travel through the turbulent transition of the coming weeks and months. Our national leadership must discover what method of achieving the underlying interests of our people will lead to a safe result from our choice of policy, and to win the population, or much of it to the necessity of that choice. Past performance, and preceding trends of opinion are no longer a safe basis for judgments in choices of national policy, when a nation is struck by a systemic crisis of the type whose expressed turbulence is already wracking our world today. This is, in short, a time of previously uncharted waters, a time for a leadership which leads, rather than follows trends.
This is a time for shaping the thinking of the citizenry, as President Franklin Roosevelt's "Fireside Chats" led the nation, mostly willingly, to new, previously uncharted directions toward some goal defined by a clear "exit strategy." A U.S. President for a time of great systemic crisis can not rule effectively by an affectation of "noblesse oblige"; the President must lead the people as part of that people, even, most above all, that part which inhabits the ranks of the "have nots."
The effective approach, under these new circumstances, will be premised on assessing the potential for radical changes in the direction of opinion-formation, sometimes even over such short-term intervals as one or two weeks. This prospect must be approached from a strategic, rather than merely tactical standpoint.
Assuming a livable outcome of the November election, providing the needed strategic advice and support for a President Kerry as the key to the fate of our republic, is something which should have been settled, beginning several or more months prior to the Boston convention. The contrast between the patched-together platform presented at the last minute for the convention, and my thoroughly composed alternative presented then, typifies the point. What we should require of a President is that he performs well enough to ensure our nation's future, whatever combination of factors must be brought together to bring about that happy result. That happy result must be prepared in depth before the general election.
To bring that needed result off by the time of the immediate aftermath of the election, we must be committed not to craft a Presidency which patronizes the people as a privileged lord of the manor might donate assorted benefits to the genuflecting underlings of the estate; we need a Presidency which truly confides in, educates, and responds to the people. Not a patroon, nor a pathetic poltroon such as George W., but a President of, for, and by the people, a President who emulates the coincidence of personal humility and bold leadership of an Abraham Lincoln, and who brings the people generally along with him, rather than herding them like the munificent lord of a feudal estate.
Much more on this subject could, and should be said; but leave that presently unfinished part of the chore to the abundance of occasions which will arise during the weeks ahead.
