LaRouche Wins 8.2% in Pennsylvania
PHILADELPHIA, April 24, 1996--Unofficial election returns show that at least 60,000 Pennyslvania Democrats voted for Lyndon LaRouche in the state's Democratic Presidential primary yesterday. With 98% of precincts reporting, the LaRouche vote totalled 58,761, with 659,611 for President Clinton, giving LaRouche about 8.2% of the vote statewide.
This percentage maintains the pattern of solid support which LaRouche has demonstrated in more than half a dozen of the states where he has been on the ballot this year. Despite a near-total press blackout, LaRouche has garnered a range of 7-12% of the vote, and as high as 34.5%.
The approximately 60,000 votes in Pennsylvania brings LaRouche's total so far this season to about 430,000 votes. His most significant primary vote results thus far are as follows: Delaware, 9.6%; North Dakota, 34.5%; Colorado, 11.1%; Louisiana, 11.69%; Oklahoma, 12.63%; Mississippi, 7.6%; Ohio, 8.25%; and California, at 7%.
LaRouche is on the ballot in eight more primaries, and plans to continue his national television advertisement campaign, which has so far featured three half-hour prime-time spots on major national and international issues. The upcoming primaries are in Washington, D.C., North Carolina, Nebraska, West Virginia, Arkansas, Kentucky, Alabama, and New Jersey.
A Grass-Roots Mobilization
With a tight press blackout against his campaign, LaRouche's Pennsylvania vote was almost completely the result of a grass-roots mobilization, in hundreds of communities and workplaces in every corner of the Commonwealth. The campaign directly mobilized over 550 people to distribute hundreds of thousands of pamphlets, plus tens of thousands of copies of the newspaper New Federalist, (the only national newspaper to give consistent coverage to LaRouche's campaign) all in the last two weeks before the April 23 primary. Some 936,150 pamphlets outlining the evidence supporting his exoneration had been distributed in Pennsylvania as of April 19.Supporters also mobilized with leaflets and phone trees, to get the word out about LaRouche's April 18 CBS-TV national broadcast, as well as two local half-hour broadcasts in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh the weekend before the election. The local programs were rebroadcasts of LaRouche's second national TV spot, where he explained why "Newt Gingrich is a Hitler-style criminal."
In 19 of 66 counties, LaRouche received 10% of the vote or higher.
In the formerly heavily industrialized counties of western Pennsylvania, including Pittsburgh and surrounding areas, LaRouche's vote was running a solid 9-14%. In Westmoreland County, just east of Pittsburgh, where LaRouche supporters have held weekly "chapter meetings" for the past year, LaRouche won 13.4%, getting 20-25% in several precincts. LaRouche's total of 5,536 votes in this county, was 1,000 votes higher than the vote total in the GOP primary of the well-publicized Pat Buchanan.
Ironically, Westmoreland County is the home base of fanatical LaRouche-hater Richard Mellon Scaife, the millionaire publisher of the Tribune-Review newspaper. Pamphlets circulated by the LaRouche campaign exposed Scaife as a leader of the anti-LaRouche media conspiracy, hatched at secret meetings in New York City in 1983. Scaife is also a major contributor to Newt Gingrich's GOPAC front group.
'Knew, Or Should Have Known'
LaRouche's campaign effort in Pennsylvania distinguished itself from other candidates by demonstrating the power of ideas. When Republican Governor Tom Ridge announced budget cuts in the state's medical assistance program, designed to eliminate the health care "safety net" for an estimated 260,000 of the working poor and disabled, LaRouche supporters intervened against the cuts. The campaign's intervention was based on LaRouche's insistence on applying the standards of the postwar Nuremberg trials.In a March 2 national TV broadcast, LaRouche had pointed out that Nazi leaders tried at Nuremberg, were not convicted of personally killing people, but rather, because they "knew, or should have known" that their policies would result in wrongful deaths. On this basis, LaRouche said, Gingrich and his accomplices were guilty of Nazi-like "crimes against humanity," since their budget cuts would accelerate the death rate among targetted classes of people, especially the elderly, disabled, and poor.
Twenty LaRouche supporters picketed the district office of Republican Speaker of the House Matthew Ryan on March 22; the local newspaper quoted Ryan protesting, "I don't like being called a Nazi." The next day, several LaRouche campaign activists, led by a physician, engaged in a 20-minute public dialogue about Nuremberg, at a town meeting with Republican State Representative Pat Carone; by the end of the discussion, Rep. Carone announced her intention of opposing Ridge's cuts.
On March 25, LaRouche campaign representative Phil Valenti led a press conference and lobbying effort in the state capital in Harrisburg, and joined a raucous demonstration of Philadelphia community groups against Ridge's killer budget. Later that day, in a nationally significant victory over Gingrich's "Conservative Revolution," 24 Republicans joined a solid Democratic bloc, and rejected Ridge's cuts, sending the bill back to committee.
At an April 4 press conference in Philadelphia, LaRouche emphasized that introduction of the Nuremberg standard into the debate on the budget cuts, was central to the defeat of the bill. He went on to suggest that alternative budget proposals could be based on ideas circulated by Democratic U.S. Senators Bingaman (D-NM) and Daschle (D-SD), including taxation of financial speculation.
"Pennsylvania," LaRouche said, "by addressing that issue competently, and by showing that the Democratic Party of Pennsylvania can provide national leadership in this, can help set a pattern, which would be beneficial to the U.S. Congress and the nation as a whole."
