"My relationship to ACORN is pretty straightforward. . . . It's probably 13 years ago, when I was still practicing law, I represented ACORN. And my partner in that representation was the U.S. Justice Department in having Illinois implement what was called the Motor Voter law to make sure people could go to DMVs and driver's license facilities to get registered. It wasn't being implemented. That was my relationship and is my relationship to ACORN.
"There is an ACORN organization in Chicago. They've been active. As an elected official, I've had interactions with them. But they are not advising our campaign. We've got the best voter registration and turn-out and volunteer operation in politics right now and we don't need ACORN's help. . . .
"This [problem of fraudulent voter registrations] is another one of these distractions that gets stirred up during the course of a campaign. But what I want to make sure of is that this is not used as an excuse for the kind of voter suppression strategies and tactics that we have seen in the past. Let's just make sure everybody is voting, everybody is registered. Let's make sure everybody is doing it in a lawful way."
Isn't that sweet?
"Thirteen years ago. . . . That was my relationship and is my relationship to ACORN."
Except, as quoted in this blog, what about Toni Foulkes' article in the Spring 2004 issue of Social Policy magazine where she says,
Since [1992], we have invited Obama to our leadership training sessions to run the session on power every year, and, as a result, many of our newly developing leaders got to know him before he ever ran for office. Thus, it was natural for many of us to be active volunteers in his first campaign for State Senate and then his failed bid for U.S. Congress in 1996. By the time he ran for U.S. Senate [i.e., 2004--jah], we were old friends. . . .--Somehow, to me, running the ACORN "session on power every year" till 2004 doesn't look like a one-shot lawsuit 13 years ago!
And then what about this clip from the December 2007 meeting of the Center for Community Change?
Master of Ceremonies: "If elected President of the United States, would you agree, in your first 100 days, to meet with a delegation of representatives from these various community organizations that campaigned for community values: could they count on you, in your first 100 days, to sit down with them?"
Obama: "Yes. But let me even say, before I even get inaugurated, during the transition, we're going to be calling all of you in to help us shape the agenda. We're going to be having meetings all across the country with community organizations so that you have input into the agenda of the next presidency of the United States of America."
Clearly, that's not suggesting ACORN or similar "community organizations" are "advising" his campaign. And perhaps he doesn't "need" ACORN's help at this stage of the election cycle, but it definitely shows where his sympathies lie . . . and they are with people who look for the government, more or less, to do everything in their behalf, people who are addicted to government largesse rather than making their way, as much as possible, on their own.
And then, finally, what about Obama's comment that "I want to make sure . . . that this is not used as an excuse for the kind of voter suppression strategies and tactics that we have seen in the past. . . . Let's make sure everybody is doing it in a lawful way."
Anyone reminded of the Cloward-Piven Strategy discussed here beginning about halfway down my A little more about politics . . . post form last Saturday?
As the author of the original Cloward-Piven Strategy report note,
First proposed in 1966 and named after Columbia University sociologists Richard Andrew Cloward and Frances Fox Piven, the "Cloward-Piven Strategy" seeks to hasten the fall of capitalism by overloading the government bureaucracy with a flood of impossible demands, thus pushing society into crisis and economic collapse. . . .And that, it appears, is exactly what the ACORN activists are seeking to do . . . whether or not they succeed in rigging the election directly through voter fraud: overwhelm the system so that someone, somewhere, will be denied the legitimate right to vote because the election officials are trying so desperately to exclude all the overwhelming mass of illegitimate "voters."
Cloward-Piven's early promoters cited radical organizer Saul Alinsky as their inspiration. "Make the enemy live up to their (sic) own book of rules," Alinsky wrote in his 1989 book Rules for Radicals. When pressed to honor every word of every law and statute, every Judaeo-Christian moral tenet, and every implicit promise of the liberal social contract, human agencies inevitably fall short. The system's failure to "live up" to its rule book can then be used to discredit it altogether, and to replace the capitalist "rule book" with a socialist one.
