The second of two articles
That’s a question we should be asking when we look at the strange case of Proposition 64, a California political campaign that epitomizes the style and substance of the web of organizations headed by America’s most interesting and potentially most dangerous right-wing extremist, Lyndon H. LaRouche Jr.
The campaign was marked by frequent controversy. At one point California’s secretary of state threatened immediate legal action if petition circulators did not stop harassing potential signers and misrepresenting the contents of the measure. Last July, she took the unprecedented legal step of going to court to challenge the truthfulness of pro-64 ballot arguments. The secretary of state was objecting to the case for Proposition 64 that the LaRouche camp turned in to run in the ballot pamphlets–giving arguments pro and con–that the state would be mailing to all registered voters. The three assertions expunged by order of a Superior Court judge said: “AIDS is not “hard to get’; it is easy to get”; “Potential insect and respiratory transmission has been established by numerous studies”; and “Transmission by “casual contact’ is well established.”
At the outset of any initiative campaign, opinion polls invariably show wide public support, and Proposition 64 was no exception. But in the waning days of the campaign, the outlook changed. At first stunned and taken aback, the opposition quickly mobilized: at the end of last September, California’s Fair Political Practices Commission reported that 13 opposing Political Action Committees had raised and spent more than $1.1 million, leaving some $100,000 cash on hand for a last-minute ad blitz. By contrast, PANIC–the sole proponent–claimed to have collected a mere $10,000 beyond what it spent to get the proposition on the ballot. In the home stretch, PANIC did not even have working phones. California overwhelmingly rejected Proposition 64, giving it only 29 percent of the vote.
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First, it’s important to understand what LaRouche was really asking the voters to support. The real goals of Proposition 64 were laid out in “A Crash Program to Fight AIDS,” which appeared in the October 1985 Opsbulletin. These were: to mandate blood screening and firing of all suspected carriers; to set up nationwide “research institutes” where AIDS patients could be committed, either voluntarily or compulsorily; and to initiate a crash program, “using conventional and unconventional methods,” to effect prevention, treatment, and cure.
But look what he’s gained for his money: Nearly a third of the California voters supported Proposition 64, whether they understood it or not. That makes LaRouche look legitimate, and he can easily make the case that he was ganged up on by a million-dollar consortium of homosexuals, communists, leftists, and the like–the speeches almost write themselves. He forced his opponents to spend a rather large amount of money, while himself spending rather little. Indeed, there’s no reason to think that the financial statements filed by PANIC reflect the entire financial impact of the Proposition 64 campaign on the LaRouche organization as a whole. AIDS was not just a PANIC issue, but a LaRouche issue, and the California campaign generated widespread attention. It’s certainly conceivable that LaRouche profited, even though PANIC went under.
Assume that the point of the organization is to put into effect all the strange and varied proposals of all the strange and varied groups, and the whole setup seems ungainly and irrational. No single organization is big enough to have much effect. They rarely or never engage in the sort of consensus building and compromise that mark legitimate single-interest groups, even fairly extreme ones. They seem to have no interest in continuity, engaging in image-destroying stunts and even passing in and out of existence with scarcely a word.
