Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, May 30, 1994 TAG: 9405300036
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B1 EDITION: HOLIDAY
SOURCE: ALEC KLEIN STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LYNCHBURG LENGTH: Long
With a hint of a sneer, she mimics her gallery of skeptics, "Does she look like a brainwashed zombie?"
No. Behind the podium at a recent campaign stop, she looks more like an intellectual June Cleaver. With an edge.
"We're heading for a banking crisis," she declares.
Today's crowd of gritty union workers apparently has heard worse after weathering 76 days on the picket line.
She moves on to another topic - Bill Clinton: "The fact is, he's our president and he's under assault, and not just by greedy Republicans. . . . It's coming from British financial powers."
And then she takes a wild swing: "Ollie North is one of the biggest drug pushers in the United States."
For the moment, the political pulpit belongs to 50-year-old Nancy Spannaus, who last week took her long-shot campaign for the U.S. Senate through the old mill towns and tobacco farms of Southwest Virginia.
It's a world away from the suburbs of Cincinnati circa 1957, where a 14-year-old neophyte named Nancy Bradeen sang in church and gave a Sunday youth sermon on social inequities.
Guided by a devoutly religious mother, Spannaus once considered entering divinity school. Today, she does not belong to a church. She chose a different path.
On June 14, her name will be the first to appear on the ballot in the Democratic primary for incumbent Sen. Charles Robb's seat.
And she is the first to predict the outcome: "No, I don't think I'm going to win."
Spannaus, in her third bid for statewide office in four years, is running on principles under the banner of Lyndon LaRouche, the five-time presidential candidate who served five years in federal prison for conspiracy and mail fraud in soliciting $30 million in loans.
"The idea that the LaRouche label makes somebody unelectable, . . . that's a myth," LaRouche said in a telephone interview from his home outside Leesburg.
Democratic leaders differ. "She's not a Democrat," former state party Chairman Paul Goldman said of Spannaus. "I mean, how do you put it? She, that whole crew, that LaRouche crew, they aren't rowing with a lot of oars."
Ideologically, they are hard to define, but all see the world through a lens of interlocking conspiracies featuring a corrupt international financial system.
The LaRouche movement is believed to encompass thousands of adherents, including scores who are seeking public office across the nation.
"You can be bizarre and still not be stupid," said Alan M. Schwartz, research director of the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith, which has tangled in court with LaRouche. "He and his organization have mastered the election laws, they know how to collect signatures and raise funds."
Spannaus filed before any of her Democratic opponents, amassing more than twice the 15,000 signatures needed to qualify for the ballot. And yet she expects to spend only about $200,000 on her campaign.
Spannaus is not a packaged politician. If she's angry, she doesn't hide it; if she is unfamiliar with an issue, she lets it be known.
"She seems to be sincere and genuine and committed to presenting her message," said Robert D. Holsworth, a political scientist at Virginia Commonwealth University.
She also is highly educated, a graduate of Bryn Mawr College and Columbia University. Spannaus reads about cybernetics and talks off-the-cuff about Plato during leisure strolls down country roads near her Lovettsville home in Loudoun County.
It is perhaps the legacy of Donald Bradeen, her father, a strict intellectual and a classics professor who nurtured Spannaus in an atmosphere of books and fostered a thirst for knowledge.
"My father always called me an agitator," Spannaus said. "This was long before Mr. LaRouche."
The oldest of three sisters and two brothers, she is the only Bradeen involved in the LaRouche movement. "I didn't go to them for political judgment," she said.
But Spannaus has made it a part of her own home: She is editor of the LaRouche-affiliated newspaper, The New Federalist; Edward, her husband, works for Executive Intelligence Review, a LaRouche-founded magazine; and Andrew, her 22-year-old son, is living in Milan, Italy, organizing events for the Schiller Institute, another LaRouche affiliate.
Of her own accord, Spannaus gave up a brief career as a New York City social worker and turned to LaRouche's teachings in the late 1960s. Since then, she has expounded in public on LaRouchian precepts: George Bush as Oliver North's real Iran-Contra boss; the United Nations as the mastermind of a genocidal policy; Henry Kissinger, former U.S. secretary of state, as a British intelligence agent.
"Why do people say it's ridiculous without looking into the facts?" she wonders.
"It's certainly not a cult; we have a lot of unique thinkers in their own right," said Stuart Rosenblatt, a Norfolk campaign worker who met Spannaus 20 years ago. "So the attraction is, he [LaRouche] is right. We're in the middle of a crisis and there's a sense that the emperor has no clothes."
Nonetheless, LaRouche has been ridiculed for many of his ideas - for example, blaming President Lincoln's assassination on British and Jewish influences and proposing the colonization of Mars as an investment in technology and human survival.
"But I'm not talking about packing up the bags and going to the airport," LaRouche noted wryly.
Spannaus and LaRouche are linked by more than unconventional ideas. Her husband, Edward, was convicted and jailed for 33 months in connection with LaRouche's fund-raising activities, fueling her first run for office in 1990 - against Republican U.S. Sen. John Warner.
"After we heard of the verdict and before the sentence," Spannaus said, "I said if he went to jail, I would run for office, because I thought it would be important to dramatize the importance of the situation."
Spannaus continued to campaign that year after her 19-year-old son, Michael, died in a car accident on New Year's Day. She continued to campaign after Democratic leaders spurned her attempt to represent the party in what turned into a shouting match at one raucous meeting.
She drew 18.3 percent of the vote as an independent.
Last year, running for governor, she drew 1 percent.
Keywords:
POLITICS
by CNB