John McCain may fear the evils of ACORN now, but in 2006 he was speaking at ACORN events:
I dealt with ACORN a couple times in 2005 and 2006, and the idea that they're the genius architects of some national effort to rob Republicans of the election they're already going to lose is pretty amusing. At the time, I largely stopped using ACORN on stories because I found their press shop too amateurish. Among other things, their communications guy found e-mail to be an intimidating and needlessly complex tool. To imagine these folks plotting anything as intricate as decisive electoral fraud would be a fun mental exercise for days when I felt blue ("So you're saying they vote electronically now? Like, on a TV?"), were some folks not making a serious effort to sell the storyline. But of course, folks are making a serious effort to sell the story line. Some segments of our political system have decided it would be helpful to argue that the black guy got elected through massive voter fraud that wherein poor and minority voters illegally registered and then came out to steal the election. I think we're not allowed to call these people racists (so shrill! so accurate!), but they're certainly racial opportunists engaged in a preemptive project to leverage racial resentment and mistrust in order to a create a rightwing counternarrative that paints Barack Obama's election as the illegitimate product of black voter fraud. Charming.
