The only presidential candidate running his campaign from behind bars is political maverick Lyndon H. LaRouche Jr. And it looks like U.S. taxpayers may help him finance that campaign.
LaRouche is one of nine Democratic candidates who have applied for federal funds to match the campaign contributions they have raised. To qualify, a candidate must raise at least $100,000 from contributors in at least 20 states. Thanks to his minions hustling money in airports across the country, LaRouche will easily meet the requirements.
That means he could be taking money from the government that he claims conspired to throw him in jail. (His campaign posters say, "Lyndon LaRouche for President, the Only Opponent George Bush Feared Enough to Put in Prison.")
LaRouche has been in federal prison since January 1989 after he was convicted of illegal fund-raising and sentenced to 15 years. At his trial, LaRouche was denied the chance to introduce evidence that he maintains would have proved federal agents spied on him for political reasons.
Jail time has not slowed LaRouche. In addition to running his campaign, he has written three books, spreading the gospel of his unorthodox political views.
LaRouche, 69, spoke to us by phone from prison in Rochester, Minn. He told our associate Jim Lynch why he is running for president for the fifth time: "I don't think anyone else can handle the job. I'm afraid if I don't run, my policies won't be on the table."
He's right on that score. LaRouche is the only candidate who thinks the federal government should file under Chapter 11 bankruptcy provisions and start again. He labels the past 28 years "the years of the coverup of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy." He calls George Bush "insane, a new Emperor Caligula of sorts." He reads the Wall Street Journal so he knows what the enemy is thinking. In fact, he calls the newspaper an "enemy publication" and philosophically "hilarious."
No big-name Democrats, or any mainstream politicians for that matter, embrace LaRouche publicly, although he claims some do in private. He says he is not an "extremist," the label most often used to explain his eclectic politics because the usual tags don't fit.
LaRouche calls his politics "old-fashioned." He says Americans in the Camelot years were more inclined to think as he and his followers do today. For instance, he shares Kennedy's bold ideals about space exploration. In fact, bolder. He once said that the United States could energize its economy by populating Mars. Does he really believe that? "Oh sure. We need to do that."
Because Mars is a long way off for a construction project, LaRouche proposes using the moon as a way station where a city would be prefabricated in reduced gravity and shipped to Mars. "God gave us the moon to get to Mars," LaRouche says.
As for his well-publicized quote accusing Queen Elizabeth of drug running, LaRouche says he was misquoted. He was only saying that the queen should do something about the laundering of drug money in offshore banks.
How would President LaRouche have handled the Persian Gulf crisis? "We didn't have a gulf crisis," he says. "We manufactured it. Bush wanted it. He got it, and the British backed us up." LaRouche said he firmly believes Bush wanted Iraq to invade Kuwait.
The Federal Election Commission has not officially determined whether LaRouche qualifies for matching funds. But his track record at fund-raising is not shabby. He received more than $800,000 in matching funds for his 1988 presidential bid. The FEC is stewing about whether it could withhold money from LaRouche because he is in jail, but that isn't covered in the regulations.
An estimated 27,000 nuclear warheads are deployed in the four former Soviet republics of Russia, Byelorussia, Kazakhstan and Ukraine. The first concern of the Bush administration is seeing that those weapons are put under a political authority. Now they are controlled day to day by the Soviet High Command and guarded by the Soviet Special Weapons Custodian Section. These are crack troops who are reportedly under tight control by military hard-liners, some of whom wouldn't mind smuggling a nuclear bomb or two to such hard-line countries as China and North Korea, or even to Libya, Iraq and Iran.