ELECTIONS ’88 : 39TH CONGRESSIONAL DISTRICT : Marquis Finds LaRouche Link Wins Enemies

Don Marquis’ opponent in the 39th Congressional District race calls him a “carpetbagger” for not living in the district. But that’s almost a compliment compared to how some leaders in his own party refer to his candidacy.

Marquis, 51, has linked his congressional bid in the Nov. 8 election to the presidential candidacy of political extremist Lyndon H. LaRouche Jr. And although he is running as a Democrat, Marquis can’t get even tepid support from party regulars in his race against William E. Dannemeyer, one of the Democratic Party’s chief tormentors in the House of Representatives.

“With Dannemeyer and LaRouche, you have one crazy running against another,” said Bob Hattoy, regional director of Campaign ‘88, a Democratic activist group running party campaigns throughout California. Hattoy said the LaRouche movement is “thinly veiled fascism. I think that’s what it’s all about. I think it’s racist, nationalist, watered-down but still frightening fascism.”

Marquis has heard the designation before. “We’ve been called ‘Nazis’ in your newspaper. We’ve been called an anti-Semitic hate group cult. . .,” Marquis said. “This is the picture that many people get of LaRouche and people like me. It gets blazed across headlines of irresponsible newspapers. . . . There’s no fact in it at all. LaRouche is not a Nazi; he’s never been a Nazi. . . . To call him a Nazi is just demagoguery.”

Marquis said he is running for Dannemeyer’s seat because the Democratic Party “had written off the 39th District. They just chose to disenfranchise people who lived there. . . . I’m a registered Democrat, and that offends me when they do that.”

John Hanna, Democratic Party chairman, said the party had a candidate, Brent Hardwick, but he did not meet the filing deadline. As for Marquis’ candidacy, Hanna said: “I’m under legal obligation to support the (Democratic) ticket. I’m under no obligation to give any particular candidate any support beyond that--either money or volunteers or anything else.”

While the state Election Code stipulates that a party cannot work against a candidate running under the party banner, Marquis confirmed that his party has given him no support.

A resident of Woodland Hills in the San Fernando Valley, Marquis said he is the western regional manager of a computer sales firm. He declined to identify the firm, saying, “I just try to separate that part of my life from my candidacy. It’s not anything of huge importance, one way or the other.”

Marquis said he was born in Michigan but moved to Southern California with his family when he was 7. He said he has lived in both the Los Angeles area and Orange County and that he has an engineering degree from Cal State Los Angeles.

Divorced Father

A divorced father of two teen-age children, Marquis said he is building his campaign around the failed policies of both major parties. “Take this garbage the Republicans are talking about--70 months of uninterrupted recovery,” Marquis said. The reality, he said, is that the country is heading for a fall, which will be evidenced by a shutdown of needed social services, an impending food shortage and a stagnant economy.

What’s needed, he said, is not to focus on raising taxes or cutting spending, but on “generating wealth,” in part through the creation of “great national projects” and continued investment in such high-technology programs as the Strategic Defense Initiative.

Although the public perceives SDI, the so-called “Star Wars” program, as militaristic, it will have a spinoff effect of advancing technological research that will help in industry, Marquis said.

Marquis said SDI is “so close to working now it’s preposterous. The information has to be continually bottled up to keep people from knowing the success they’ve had.”

Asked who is doing that, he replied, “People do what they want to do. I don’t want to get into that right now.” Marquis said announcements of various SDI successes do not receive media coverage.

SDI should be developed, he said, “because it is a moneymaker. It’s not a money loser. If you think of it in terms of being a moneymaker, then you don’t have a problem building it up over time.”

Another LaRouche position that Marquis favors is the eventual colonization of Mars. As with SDI, Marquis said, the technology required to set up space colonies will have beneficial side effects on the U.S. economy.

“You can have the pessimistic view that Dannemeyer has, which is, ‘Stop the world, cut the budget, we can’t afford to live, we can’t afford to eat so cut money to the poor, don’t let these old people live, don’t have a surplus food program, don’t vote any money for the homeless. . .,’ ” Marquis said. “These are the things Dannemeyer votes on. You can’t just cut money without affecting people. It’s ‘go back in time.’ That’s where he’s at. ‘Go back in time, stop, quit, we can’t win, we’re losing, we can’t do it.’ ”

The U.S. economy, Marquis said, “is extremely fragile. . . . When you look at it, it’s going to take development to work our way through it--great national projects. It’s going to take spending in high-tech research and development.”

A Mars mission “generally sounds like a preposterous thing to do,” Marquis said, “but (President John F.) Kennedy said an equally preposterous thing when he said he wanted to put someone on the moon, and we got back $14 for every dollar we spent. That went smack into the American economy.”

Asked how LaRouche followers plan to wrest control, Marquis said, “Short of some kind of divine intervention, or moral awakening, the historical thing that happens is things go real bad and people get scared. They go out looking for a leader who hasn’t lied to them, who hasn’t shucked and jived them, hasn’t given them stupid little platitudes. And they say, ‘I remember when these guys were talking about this being a problem and, my goodness, this is what really happened.’ ”

Marquis said he plans to spend less than $20,000 on his campaign, his first try for federal office. He was an unsuccessful candidate two years ago for a spot on the Democratic Party’s State Central Committee.

LaRouche and several of his aides were indicted last week by a federal grand jury on various fraud charges. The indictment charged that LaRouche conspired to commit fraud by lying to creditors about how his organization planned to repay $30 million to creditors. The indictment also alleged that LaRouche conspired to defraud the Internal Revenue Service.

LaRouche said the government is attempting to destroy his political career.