Adam Serwer has a definitive take on ACORN, how the GOP is wrong about it, and why, nonetheless, the organization still has serious problems:
While ACORN has previously been in Republican cross hairs, Obama's connections to the group have made it even more of a lightning rod. Neither camp has been entirely honest in making its case. In the last presidential debate, Obama maintained that his only connection to ACORN was that he represented the organization as a lawyer in a court case alongside the Justice Department. In fact, the Obama campaign paid ACORN affiliate Citizen's Services, Inc. $800,000 for get-out-the-vote efforts during the 2008 primary but not for registration, as conservatives have claimed. In addition, Obama's 1992 involvement with Project Vote occurred before the group came under the auspices of ACORN in 1994, according to Project Vote spokesperson Sarah Massey.
Nevertheless, ACORN is in many ways a troubled organization. Dale Rathke, the brother of the organization's founder, embezzled nearly $1 million dollars from ACORN between 1999 and 2000. The organization later tried to conceal the embezzlement from its donors. In addition, concerns of impropriety have risen over ACORN's stewardship of Project Vote, which is a federally tax exempt nonprofit and must be nonpartisan. The New York Times reported last week that the board of Project Vote was staffed entirely by members of ACORN, which is a nonprofit but is not tax exempt and therefore not subject to the same restrictions on political activity. ACORN also owes back taxes to several states and the IRS.
Recently the group overstated the number of new voters it has registered. ACORN first reported that it had registered 1.3 million new voters, but the exact number of new voters seems to have been 450,000, with close to 30 percent of the forms filed turning out to be faulty in some way, with many either being incomplete, duplicates, or having false names. As for the argument that ACORN is trying to swing the election through fraudulent forms, Brian Kettenring argues the organization is in fact, being victimized by employees who are being paid for not actually doing any work.
And Harold Meyerson reports on how the Obama campaign's overwhelming pull is suffocating liberal 527 groups in Ohio:
This year, Barack Obama's presidential campaign has more money, organizers, and volunteers than the 527s (or anyone else in American political history) could even dream of. (Newsweek's Howard Fineman recently estimated the national number of volunteers at a mind-boggling 5 million.) Within Ohio, says state campaign communications director Isaac Baker, Obama has 89 field offices, an unspecified number (but surely in excess of 450) of paid organizers, and thousands of volunteers, 10,000 of whom walked precincts on the weekend of Oct. 18-19. The revitalized Ohio Democratic Party, its fortunes bolstered by Gov. Ted Strickland and Sen. Sherrod Brown, both elected in 2006, now has 75 offices of its own around the state, and is campaigning hard in five currently Republican congressional districts.
So what has become of the parallel party of 2004? What has become of all those organizations that arose when Democrats feared the new campaign finance reform laws would leave them at a competitive disadvantage unless their allies in the labor, feminist, and environmental communities, funded directly by such mega-donors as George Soros, could field get-out-the-vote operations of their own? What's become of ACT, and of America Votes, which four years ago coordinated the activities of all those groups?
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—The Editors
