The Wizard of Odd
by Carl Kozlowski

You've probably seen his followers manning tables on college campuses, outside post offices and on street corners - handing out pamphlets urging voters to oppose the California recall (especially Schwarzenegger's ascendance to power), the electrical deregulation mess in California, or even calling Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney "children of Satan."

No, we're not talking about Howard Dean, John Kerry or even Dennis Kucinich. We're talking about Lyndon LaRouche, the man often derided as a political joke for his perennial presidential campaigns and status as a convicted felon for mail fraud and income tax evasion.

Dean laid claim to having passionate youth followers who signed up by the tens of thousands on the Internet, but they abandoned him when it came time to vote in Iowa and left him yapping like a prairie dog during his post-primary meltdown. But, LaRouche's kids - called the "Youth Movement" by the campaign and "LaRouchies" by detractors - are notorious for marching across campuses nationwide, disrupting classes with bullhorns, impeding the progress of students who try to sidestep their brochures, and working up to 15-hour days for what they consider a "revolution."

It seems odd, but odder still is the fact that the man in charge rarely even makes a campaign stop or public appearance in America, the country he supposedly seeks to lead - preferring to globetrot to conferences overseas or stay on his heavily guarded estate in rural Virginia. Granted, Lyndon LaRouche is 81 years old, but even so. his campaign seems to be classic example of the phrase "running to stand still.

So when there was a noticeable up-tick in activity by his local followers and word leaked out that LaRouche was actually coming to Los Angeles to deliver a body-slamming speech against Schwarzenegger last September 11, the mix of timing and events was worth investigating. At least the old guy was more interesting than the blow-dried personalities offered up by the parties' major candidates.

"We can't just be concerned that people have life and a home, but about their conditions on their way home. How many hours a day do people commute? How many jobs do they commute to? And what does this do to the quality of their family life and their neighborhoods and the fabric of our society?"

If I didn't tell you these words came from Lyndon LaRouche in that September 11 speech, you might think they came from the lips of President Bush in his State of the Union address. Yet while Bush conquers the Middle East in pursuit of oil, LaRouche speaks and writes about ideas like establishing high-speed railways within and between major population centers that can generate millions of jobs in New Deal fashion. Hear the words alone and you might think any other progressive, environmentalist politician - even Al Gore - is talking. In fact, from that end of the spectrum, he sounds downright normal.

The problem is, Lyndon LaRouche doesn't have a normal background at all.

"Lyndon LaRouche comes from a quasi-Quaker, fundamentalist family who were anti-Semitic, and he reacted against his parents by joining the Socialist Workers Party in the 1940s," said Dennis King, author of the 1989 Doubleday book Lyndon LaRouche and the New American Fascism. "He was too smart for that group, so he started his own group in Manhattan around 1968.

"Eventually he turned from a guru into a cult leader, and when the antiwar movement wound down after Vietnam, he saw he could get bigger gate receipts on the right," King continued. "He returned to the views of his parents, though he uses coded anti-Semitism."

King believes that LaRouche's views are fascist, because fascism centers on a cult of personality and can shift politically between aspects of the left and the right. Yet LaRouche's press spokesman and right-hand man for the western United States, Harley Schlanger, is Jewish, -- rendering King's claims of LaRouche's anti-Semitism curious.

"Instead of addressing the ideas that he raises, what people do is attack him. You hear he's an anti-Semite, but we have members of all religions here, and I'm Jewish myself," said Schlanger. "If you oppose the practices of Ariel Sharon, does that make you anti-Semitic? People can't find where they say he attacks the Jews, and they used to say we skinned cats and left them with our enemies, but no one ever showed evidence of a cat or DNA. If people just listened to LaRouche and there was no war, what would that mean? A lot of people who get money out of this war would be out."

So how has the LaRouche organization managed to maintain strength for so long?

"The answer is simple. There's 280 million people in the United States, and every year in every state, fringe candidates get on the ballot, and raise enough signatures to get on the ballot," said Bob Secter, the Illinois Political Editor for the Chicago Tribune. "People don't even realize what they're doing when they sign the ballot petitions."

But King's explanation for why the LaRouche campaign is growing on college campuses is interesting, nonetheless. Believing that the current antiwar movement is rooted in more anti-Semitism than past antiwar movements, because of anger over Israel's treatment of Palestinians, King said LaRouche can appear to "tilt leftward" while actually drawing college kids into his movement for anti-Semitic viewpoints and activities.

"I was told by the editor of 'Chronicle of Higher Education' that LaRouche has 1,000 new college-age recruits nationwide, and 1,000 fully committed young people can cause problems," said King. "He has strong intelligence ties all over the world and visited Iraq back in the 1970s, so it's natural that he would be antiwar now."

LaRouche's notoriously aggressive fundraising has enabled his team to raise more than $5 million nationally and as a result earn more than $800,000 in federal matching funds in 2003. That's a figure bigger than that raised by fellow present and former Democratic presidential candidates Al Sharpton, Carole Moseley Braun, and even Dennis Kucinich. Yet despite these fundraising successes - and landing spots on primary ballots in 13 states and the District of Columbia -  so far, he's been kept out of every debate in every election cycle he's ever run in.

"We can't control who wants to call themselves a Democrat or qualify themselves for the ballot," said Tony Welch, spokesman for the Democratic National Committee. "But we're not obligated to turn the stage over to everyone who comes along."

The official reason the Democratic National Committee is eager to keep him out of debates is that LaRouche was sentenced in 1989 to 15 years in prison for mail fraud conspiracy. He and his organization were convicted on illegal and manipulative fund-raising practices, and he was released in 1994.

But it's his outrageous comments that draw the hearts and minds of young people like the two guys who drove me to LaRouche's speech, whose identities I will protect for fear that their comments might earn them retribution from within the organization.

"Nobody else [other campaigns] ever asked us to join them. Have they tried?" asked Tony. "Nobody says 'Bush is a bipolar idiot controlled like a puppet, help me stop him.'"

"The so-called leading nine candidates don't know how to fight his fascist nature," added Marco. "They're not qualified to take risks."

Those kinds of impassioned sentiments worry people like Oscar-winning author/filmmaker Michael Moore, who noticed the LaRouche movement's presence during the tour for his book "Dude, Where's My Country?" in October.

"It does seem that there's something going on here in California with LaRouche more than anywhere else I've traveled," said Moore, when asked about the campaign. "I think it shows that there's young people really hungry for leadership alternatives, and the traditional Democratic candidates are leaving them with a vacuum of passionate leadership to get behind."

My entrée into the world of the LaRouche campaign was a college student named Wesley, who had come down from Seattle to help in the anti-recall drive. He was manning a table outside the Borders bookstore in Glendale on September 4th.

Wesley was young, clean-cut, and seemed sane, so I stopped. .And when I told him I was a reporter and curious enough to give the LaRouchies a chance to tell their side of the story, he told me that LaRouche was having a top-secret campaign rally for his L.A. supporters on September 11, and I could be in on the otherwise-private affair.

Seven nights later, I was off to a ballroom at the Burbank Hilton. My escorts seemed like fairly normal guys, college-age chaps who dressed in normal college-age clothes and had boisterous college-style laughs and senses of humor.

Arriving at the hotel, the idea that this would be a lily-white gathering of racists was rendered absurd by the crowd of 500 who were easily the most diverse group of people I'd ever seen at a political gathering. And anyone who needed Spanish translation of the night's proceedings was provided with headphones that gave an instant live feed from an interpreter.

Suddenly a door at the front of the hall opened and an old guy came barreling in faster than a speeding bullet to the stage. There was no announced intro, but the entire crowd was on their feet as one, in a standing ovation. Lyndon LaRouche was in the building. But instead of talking right away, he took a seat as a young Latino student introduced a student chorus from a LaRouche-funded school called the Schiller Institute. They took the stage and sang "O Freedom," a Negro spiritual that was described as "the theme song of the LaRouche Movement on the West Coast." The tune was an old slave song about deliverance to the Lord after death - not the most optimistic view I've ever heard from a campaign. Or the most pertinent. Or frankly, youthful. Then again, LaRouche is 81.

Finally, it was time for the main man to speak, and he was certainly colorful.

Wonder what he thinks of this Bush? "The dumbest man in America was seated as President." How about Cheney? "Cheney and his ilk are man-beasts and Satans. Cheney is an intrinsically evil person. If he were more intelligent, he would be Satanic. But he is only a thug for Satan."

In more practical, current terms, LaRouche and his people had proven their stripes to the Democratic cause by printing up and distributing 500,000 copies of a magazine entitled "Who Robbed California?" which purported to tell the story of the energy deregulation disaster in California and their claim that Schwarzenegger's rise was part of a conspiracy tied into that. . Things were fairly routine until Hollywood liberal legend Ed Asner walked into the room and sat down in front of me. It was my turn to pounce, and Ed's turn to look stunned.

"I just [came] because I had heard contradicting rumors of him and had dismissed him because of it, but I found him very enjoyable," said Asner. "Everything I've heard from him is in the progressive agenda that I entertain.

"All too often Democrats play go-along to get-along, and LaRouche shows that it's more than the head of the pimple that's gotta be squeezed," Asner continued. "I support Kucinich really, and I can't make a judgment on the time LaRouche spent [in jail] because he will not be the first person to be placed there and silenced that way in America. I am certainly aware that he is controversial, but in this case, that attracts me because I tend to be seen as controversial in the same way."

LaRouche ran out the door of the Burbank Hilton as quickly as he had come in, after leaving his followers with this directive: "Have fun!" True to his command, the fun was just beginning.

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