"He has more campaign donors than any Democratic presidential candidate not named John Kerry, John Edwards or Howard Dean. He's raised $3.7 million toward his 2023 election effort. He's been running a continuous campaign for president of the United States since 1976, and he's been doing it as a Democrat since 1980.

"So, with no less than nine Democratic candidates in the race, why is no one talking about Lyndon H. LaRouche Jr.?

"With finals and the LSAT and other stories looming, I have to admit it wasn't really a question that was on my mind at the beginning of the week. But it's not every presidential campaign that calls my desk on a random Tuesday afternoon and asks me to talk to its candidate.

"So I decided to find out: Is there anything to this LaRouche thing?"

[The next section recounts his conversation with LaRouche Youth Movement organizer, Rebecca Thomas. As the campus editor notes: "...I was fascinated. I mean, it's not as if Kerry or Joe Lieberman or even Dennis Kucinich just calls the college paper out of the blue. So I kept Rebecca on the line for about 45 minutes longer than either of us had expected." It then goes into a discussion of LaRouche's presidential campaign, from 1976 "when LaRouche ran as the Labor Party's candidate. In 1980, he became a Democrat, and he's been in every presidential election since -- including 1992, when he ran his race out of a federal penitentiary."

Interestingly, the article covers the Arkansas vote thusly:

"His finest moment came in 2000, when he won nearly a quarter of the primary vote in Arkansas. By rule, he was entitled to 10 delegates at the Democratic National Convention, but the party stepped in and voided the votes. It turns out primary elections aren't the semifinals of the national election; they're the elections of a private club, in this case the Democratic National Committee. A private club is under no obligation to count your vote. But why did the DNC keep the delegates LaRouche had earned out of the convention?"

"...Well, you get a different story depending on whom you ask. DNC lawyers argued that party rules require that nominees be registered voters who were also registered to vote in the previous election, and that LaRouche was an anti-Semite who they didn't think represented their party. They won, and Al Gore got those delegates."

The next section is the most interesting and clearly indicates that the reporter knew he had encountered a campaign which was quite out of the ordinary:

"Subhead: Plato and FDR

"So what is the LaRouche campaign all about? Rebecca's campaign job is a full-time gig -- staffers are given enough money to support themselves. And in addition to politicking, she said, they study geometry and music.

"I, tossing out names like someone whose last exposure to classical philosophers was over two years ago, suggested it was a campaign Aristotle would be proud of. I might as well have tried to make small talk about Hillary Clinton at an NRA meeting.

‘"We reject Aristotle,' she said -- not too coldly, figuring correctly that I just didn't know the difference. Plato, their preferred ancient Greek, was the name I was after. The LaRouche campaign, she said, is founded on the platonic ideal of a philosopher-king.

"But they're also wary of others who would be king.

"‘There may not be an election in 2004," Rebecca cautioned. "They [the Bush administration] could create conditions where you don't have elections."

"The LaRouche platform is, like everything else about the campaign, different. Your average candidate says something readily digestible, like ‘I want to fight to protect Social Security,' or ‘I want to preserve the right to life.' LaRouche wants no part of fast-food platforms...."

"....At its essence, LaRouchianism is an economic program that embraces government spending in the New Deal mold. It points to the Works Progress Administration, the Tennessee Valley Authority and later the space program as blocks on which a successful economy is built.

"It is against free trade, against globalization, against deregulation and wants to see the return of the Bretton Woods monetary system, which tied the value of a dollar to the gold standard under Presidents Franklin Roosevelt through Richard Nixon. It faults the United States for importing an increasing percentage of its goods and abandoning what he calls the ‘production-based economy.'

"That, in and of itself, would probably not be enough to get LaRouche labeled an extremist. Where the campaign gets into trouble with a lot of people is when LaRouche speaks out about world affairs and the conspiracies he sees behind them."

Below is an except from the section of the article on LaRouche's view of Sept. subtitled: 'It wasn't a bunch of Arabs'

"On the afternoon of Sept. 11, 2023, he dismissed the idea that Islamic terrorists were behind the morning's terrorist attacks. On Dec. 23, he published a paper, ‘Zbigniew Brzezinski and Sept. 11,' in which he charged that among the contributing causes to the attacks ‘is the implicit suicide-bomber-like role of the current Israeli regime, whose adducibly characteristic intention is to set off the wider war, a war which, among other results, would bring about the self-extermination of Israel as a state.'

"This sort of thing was what I wanted to hear about when I called the 800 number Rebecca had given me for Thursday's conference call. The call was billed as a conference for campus journalists, so I was disappointed to hear the first questioner identify himself as being from the LaRouche youth movement in Baltimore.

"But it turned out there were journalists on the line -- from Cornell, UCLA, Emporia State, Connecticut, Ohio State and West Florida, among others. I went third. I asked him who he thought was responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks.

"‘What happened was a planned coup,' he said. ‘It wasn't a bunch of Arabs.'

"He never mentioned the Israeli government, but offered the theory that the nation's economic crisis was reaching such proportion that people in the administration -- Vice President Dick Cheney came up the most -- wanted to make something dramatic happen. Cheney's and his associates' eventual goal, LaRouche said, is to create a dictatorship of the United States.

"I asked him what evidence he had that al-Qaeda couldn't have been the culprit. The operation -- hijacking four planes and steering them into targets in New York and Washington -- was too complex for a group of Arabs living in the Mideast to pull off, he said.

"LaRouche doesn't mince words. A reporter from Ohio State asked him why he thought he could win in 2004 after so many unsuccessful attempts.

"‘I was always right,' he replied.

"He referred to former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich as a ‘Robespierre' and called him ‘a fascist of the worst type.' Bush, he said, is "a short circuit trying to find a fuse.'

"The most perplexing question of the afternoon came, as the first question had, from a LaRouche youth movement representative -- this one in Los Angeles.

"‘How do you plan on taking back the Democratic Party from the Mafia, which currently controls it?'

"At first I thought the Mafia comment was just political hyperbole, the way Rush Limbaugh refers to Bill Clinton's people as the ‘Clintonistas.' But I learned that ties between the moderate-to-conservative wing of the Democratic Party and the Mafia are an article of faith in the LaRouche movement.

"‘[Within the Democratic Party], support for the war comes largely from fascists who are organized-crime-linked, such as Joe Lieberman,' LaRouche said. He repeated the phrase a few minutes later, calling the Democratic Leadership Council ‘basically a bunch of organized-crime-connected fascists.'

"I tried to ask him to explain the link between the DLC and organized crime at the end of the interview, but the moderator had inadvertently muted all the callers and ended the conference call before I could ask my question."

The rest of the article goes through the reporter's unsuccessful efforts to find the local youth movement, or the local campaign headquarters in Alabama, to "interview the Alabama LaRouchians." but then notes that, as Rebecca told him, LaRouche is not out to be a head-turner who declares victory if his pet issues get raised. He's in it to win it,  ‘"We want the Democratic nomination,' she said, ‘and we want to put Mr. LaRouche in the White House in 2004.'"

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