by Paul Rosenberg [courtesy of Open Left - Front Page]

Earlier this week, my diary "Ayers Attack 'Ridiculous,' 'Nonsensical,' 'Silly'--Former GOP IL State Rep" highlighted an NPR story debunking the notion that William Ayers was some sort of sinister figure when Barack Obama first crossed paths with him politically.  This morning, my previous diary, "The Discourse of 'Terrorism' - Thinking The Unthinkable", cut more deeply, questioning even the notion of casually labelling Ayers a "domestic terrorist" and the larger framework of "terrorist" discourse behind such labelling.   I now want to take a similarly broad look at how ACORN and Ayers are both being used in building a demonizing narrative against Obama, which we should expect to be used to try to delegitimize him, just as the GOP worked feverishly to delegitimize Bill Clinton in the 1990s.  I had hoped to do it in a single diary, but that's not really possible, so here's the first installment.
Yesterday, in The Fraud Of Fraud, Digby provided an excellent point of departure:

It's becoming clear that the fraudulent GOP "vote fraud" project is up and running at full speed and will likely be a huge story for well beyond the election. Rick Perlstein had an interaction with John Fund recently, who said right out that Democrats didn't believe in election law and would try to count illegal votes. He's selling books so perhaps his hyperbole is just salesmanship, but his prediction that a close election will be thrown into doubt because of Republican efforts to challenge every provisional ballot sounds quite plausible to me.

The process of turning ACORN into a terrorist sleeper cell has begun and I see little hope that they aren't going to be successful. The press is clearly fascinated by the right wing caricature of a group of shiftless "community organizers" trading crack for Obama votes in the inner city and have done exactly zero research into the issue, so the reporting has been hysterical.

First, we'll review the facts about ACORN, then we'll broaden out.

ACORN Basics

Digby's diary is focused intently on the voter fraud accusations, but it's quite clear-particularly from the John McCain ad she quotes-that broad spectrum demonization of ACORN is involved.  So it's only logical to start off clearing the air about ACORN in general.

In a comment yesterday, educationaction wrote:

ACORN as an organization is critically important  

They're not just attacking ACORN because of the voting issue, of course.  It is the only truly national community organizing group with a truly central staff that actually works on national issues at the same time as it maintains very strong local organizations as well.  (The other groups are umbrealla organizations that train and advise but do not, as far as I know, act as separate political/social action centers themselves.)  And it is the only major group not based in churches but on knocking on door after door.  

As a result, they are probably the most important community organizing group in the nation.  

At its website, this is what ACORN has to say about itself:

Who is ACORN?

ACORN is the nation's largest grassroots community organization of low-and moderate-income people with over 400,000 member families organized into more than 1,200 neighborhood chapters in 110 cities across the country.  Since 1970, ACORN has been building community organizations that are committed to social and economic justice, and won victories on thousands of issues of concern to our members, through direct action, negotiation, legislative advocacy and voter participation.  ACORN helps those who have historically been locked out become powerful players in our democratic system.

Community organizing: Each of the 1,200 local ACORN neighborhood chapters in 110 cities and 40 states brings neighbors together to work for stronger, safer and more just communities.

Issue campaigns:  Each ACORN office carries out multiple issue campaigns.  ACORN members across the country work to raise the minimum wage or enact living wage policies; eliminate predatory financial practices by mortgage lenders, payday lenders, and tax preparation companies; win the development of affordable housing and community benefits agreements; improve the quality of and funding for urban public schools; rebuild New Orleans; and pass a federal and state ACORN Working Families Agenda, including paid sick leave for all full time workers.

A recent study shows that our issue campaign victories have delivered approximately $15 billion in direct monetary benefits to our membership and constituency over the past 10 years.

Service delivery:  ACORN and its allied organizations provide extensive services to our members and constituency. These include free tax preparation focusing on the Earned Income Tax Credit; screening for eligibility for federal and state benefit programs; and, through the ACORN Housing Corporation, first time homeowner mortgage counseling and foreclosure prevention assistance, and low income housing development.

Ballot initiatives: ACORN-backed ballot-initiative campaigns in 2006 helped raise the minimum wage in Ohio, Arizona, Missouri and Colorado, working with community-faith-labor coalitions on successful campaigns in each state.

Voter participation:  Since 2004, ACORN has helped more than 1.7 million low- and moderate-income and minority citizens apply to register to vote.

ACORN is a non-profit, non-partisan social justice organization with national headquarters in New York, New Orleans and Washington, D.C.

McCain's Demonizing Ad, And ACORN's Response

McCain's web ad was taken down due to a copyright claim from Faux News-at least that's the official story.  But the transcript is still available, here , as part of the press release.  Also included are extensive supporting documentation, from re-lie-ably rightwing sources.  For now, however, let's just look at the transcript itself:

JOHN MCCAIN: I'm John McCain and I approve this message.

ANNCR: Who is Barack Obama?

A man with "a political baptism performed at warp speed."

Vast ambition.

After college, he moved to Chicago.

Became a community organizer.

There, Obama met Madeleine Talbot, part of the Chicago branch of ACORN.

He was so impressive that he was asked to train the ACORN staff.

What did ACORN in Chicago engage in?

Bullying banks.

Intimidation tactics.

Disruption of business.

ACORN forced banks to issue risky home loans.

The same types of loans that caused the financial crisis we're in today.

No wonder Obama's campaign is trying to distance him from the group, saying, "Barack Obama Never Organized with ACORN."

But Obama's ties to ACORN run long and deep.

He taught classes for ACORN.

They even endorsed him for President.

But now ACORN is in trouble.

REPORTER: There are at least 11 investigations across the country involving thousands of potentially fraudulent ACORN forms.

ANNCR: Massive voter fraud.

And the Obama campaign paid more than $800,000 to an ACORN front for get out the vote efforts.

Pressuring banks to issue risky loans.

Nationwide voter fraud.

Barack Obama.

Bad judgment. Blind ambition.

Too risky for America.

This is, needless to say, a typical sleazy Republican ad, full of innuendo, distortion, deception and outright lies.  For one thing, as I've pointed out previously, what's involved in the investigations is registration fraud, not voter fraud, ACORN is the victim, not the perpetrator, and has actually gathered and turned over most of the evidence now being used in the investigations.  So here is John McCain, running an ad blaming the victim of crime, but going even farther than his running mate charging rape victims for their rape kits, he's actually accusing the victims of being the criminals!

ACORN's response, however, focused on educating the media about predatory lending in the housing market, and ACORN's long-standing efforts to fight against it:

ACORN Response to Senator McCain's Smear Ad

October 10, 2008

ACORN President Maude Hurd released the following statement today in response to the McCain campaign's new ad claiming that, among other things, ACORN is responsible for the mortgage crisis:

"For almost a decade, ACORN, a community organization of 400,000 families in neighborhoods across the country, has been fighting against the predatory lending practices that have robbed our members of their homes, destabilized neighborhoods, and roiled the global economy.

"In his newest ad, John McCain's campaign bizarrely claims, 'ACORN forced banks to issue risky home loans, the same types of loans that caused the financial crisis we're in today.' Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, ACORN has worked successfully to help working class families get good home loans on fair terms from legitimate banks and has fought vigorously against predatory lenders who have ripped off families in our communities. These predatory loans caused the crisis.

"For more than a decade, ACORN members have held protests, released reports, and advocated for regulations to protect homeowners from predatory lenders. ACORN organizers and volunteers have been working day and night to help victims of the GOP economic meltdown to save their homes from foreclosure. In fact, ACORN has brought class action lawsuits against several predatory lenders, and has lobbied the Federal Reserve and Congress in support of regulations against predatory lending. ACORN has even been successful in convincing many lenders to treat homeowners more fairly and help families be able to make their mortgage payments and save their homes.

"Unfortunately, the Bush administration and Congressional Republicans like John McCain have blocked the sensible regulations that ACORN and others proposed that would have averted the mortgage meltdown. If John McCain thinks that community organizers caused the foreclosure crisis, he knows even less about the economy than previously thought.

"John McCain and the Republicans are desperately trying to shift the blame for the economic crisis they caused with a philosophy of deregulation and indifference to homeowners. All the grainy footage and creepy music in the world can't cancel out some simple, basic facts, and the facts about the economy are not on John McCain's side."

Of course political "reporters" who cover politics as defined by the rightwing noise machine know nothing about predatory lending or those routinely victimized by it.  That's not part of their beat.  Heck, it's not even part of their universe, which is why I went ahead and quoted ACORN's statement in its entirety.

Beyond what ACORN has to say for itself in the statement above, two other facts should be born in mind: first, that minorities in particular were steered toward sub-prime loans, even when they qualified for conventional loans, and second, that the current financial situation was not caused by the borrowers, but by the financial industry itself, and the risky, unstable, unaccountable aftermarkets it created in mortgage-backed securities.

But let's go a little deeper in McCain's ad on our own.  Let's start with this part:

There, Obama met Madeleine Talbot, part of the Chicago branch of ACORN.

He was so impressive that he was asked to train the ACORN staff.

To back this up, McCain's campaign includes the following documentation:

Barack Obama Was Invited By Madeleine Talbot To Help Train Her Staff At ACORN.
"Several community organizers and Altgeld Gardens tenants confirmed Johnson was working on asbestos but said Obama organized residents to act. 'He got people to vote with their feet' on the issue, organizer Madeleine Talbot said. At the time, Talbot worked at the social action group ACORN and initially considered Obama a competitor. But she became so impressed with his work that she invited him to help train her staff." (Letta Tayler And Keith Herbert, "Chicago's Streets Obama's Teacher," Newsday, 3/2/08)

So, his deep and sinister connection to ACORN was that he worked for another organization--not ACORN--whose organizer originally considered him a competitor, but later decided he was so good, she asked him to train her staff.  I'm having a really hard time understanding what's so sinister here.  Or what's so deep about the connection.   After all, ACORN never took the next step of actually, you know, hiring him away.  So what's the big deal here?

McCain's campaign even go so far as to make and "document" another claim at this point that wasn't in the ad:

In 1992, Barack Obama Was Hired By ACORN To Run A Voter Registration Effort. "Indeed, Mr. Obama has extensive connections with the granddaddy of activist groups, Acorn (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now), which has gotten millions in government grants for its low-income housing programs. In 1992, Acorn hired Mr. Obama to run a voter registration effort. He later became a trainer for the group, as well as its lawyer in election law cases. Acorn's political arm has endorsed Mr. Obama while its 'voter education' arm has pledged to spend $35 million to register people this fall -- despite a history of vote fraud scandals that have led to guilty pleas by many Acorn employees." (John Fund, "Obama's Liberal Shock Troops," The Wall Street Journal, 7/12/08)

Fund-referenced in Digby's original post-is a regular fount of lies and disinformation.  ACORN has not  "gotten millions in government grants for its low-income housing programs," it has gotten money for its low-income members and clients-as was very clearly explained in a press teleconference I took part in on Friday, where this question was posed.  Nor did Obama work for ACORN in 1992, he worked for Project Vote.  The two organizations had some contact during the 1992, but did not start working together nationally until two years later.  As the Fight The Smears website explains:

Discredited Republican voter-suppression guru Ken Blackwell is attacking Barack Obama with naked lies about his supposed connection to ACORN.

• Fact: Barack was never an ACORN  community organizer.

• Fact: ACORN never hired Obama as a trainer, organizer, or any type of employee.

• Fact: ACORN was not part of Project  Vote, the successful voter registration drive Barack ran in 1992.

In his capacity as an attorney, Barack represented ACORN in a successful lawsuit alongside the U.S. Department of Justice against the state of Illinois to force state compliance with a federal voting access law. For his work helping enforce the law, called "Motor Voter," Barack received the IVI IPO Legal Eagle Award in 1995.

McCain's campaign could easily have checked and discovered this-especially since they linked to this very page themselves.... but not to quote anything from it. Here is the full extent of their recognition of the facts laid out at Fight The Smears:

ANNCR: No wonder Obama's campaign is trying to distance him from the group, saying, "Barack Obama Never Organized with ACORN."

• The Obama Campaign: "Barack Obama Never Organized With ACORN" (Barack Obama For President Website, http://fightthesmears.com/articles/20/acornrumor, Accessed 10/4/08)

What's more, immediately after that, they go right back to implicitly lying about him having worked for ACORN in 1992-as well as working for ACORN afterwards:

ANNCR: But Obama's ties to ACORN run long and deep. He taught classes for ACORN.

• Obama Directed Project Vote And Later Taught Classes For "Future Leaders Identified By ACORN And The Centers For New Horizons." "He [Obama] says he is drawn to politics, despite its superficialities, as a means to advance his real passion and calling: community organization. ... In 1992 Obama took time off to direct Project Vote, the most successful grass-roots voter-registration campaign in recent city history. Credited with helping elect Carol Moseley-Braun to the U.S. Senate, the registration drive, aimed primarily at African-Americans, added an estimated 125,000 voters to the voter rolls--even more than were registered during Harold Washington's mayoral campaigns. 'It's a power thing,' said the brochures and radio commercials. ... Obama continues his organizing work largely through classes for future leaders identified by ACORN and the Centers for New Horizons on the south side." (Hank De Zutter, Op-Ed, "What Makes Obama Run?" Chicago Reader, 12/8/95)

No one is denying he's had contact with ACORN, and indeed, there's nothing the least bit disreptuable about either ACORN or such contact.  It's just that blatant lying about employment is pretty much a Reporting 101, black-and-white kind of thing, which also clearly demonstrates the McCain campaign's total and utter disregard for the truth.

Finally, shifting gears a bit, here's the "justification" for another part of McCain's ad:

ANNCR: What did ACORN in Chicago engage in? Bullying banks. Intimidation tactics. Disruption of business. ACORN forced banks to issue risky home loans. The same types of loans that caused the financial crisis we're in today.

• ACORN Led Protests At Banks To Force Them To Issue Risky Home Loans. "Various ACORN chapters across the country, led by folks like Chicago's Madeline Talbott, staged in-your-face protests in bank lobbies and filed complaints meant to hold up mergers sought by targeted banking firms. Talbott & Co. generally wanted them to ease down-payment requirements and ignore weak credit histories. And their intimidating tactics often necessitated police action, as at a '97 protest at Pulaski Bank & Trust in Arkansas, where activists blocked drive-through lanes." (Editorial, "The Meltdown's Acorn," New York Post, 9/29/08)

• ACORN Forced Banks To Issue Shaky Loans By Pressuring The Banks. "ACORN recognized very early the opportunity presented by the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) of 1977. As Stanley Kurtz has reported, ACORN proudly touted 'affirmative action' lending and pressured banks to make subprime loans. Madeline Talbott, a Chicago ACORN leader, boasted of 'dragging banks kicking and screaming' into dubious loans. And, as Sol Stern reported in City Journal, ACORN also found a remunerative niche as an 'advisor' to banks seeking regulatory approval." (Mona Charen, "Guilty Party: ACORN, Obama, and the mortgage mess," National Review Online, 9/30/08)

So, the McCain campaign "supports" its claims about ACORN "bully" banks into making bad loans by quoting rightwing editorial!  Heck, in 1964, Barry Goldwater could have just as easily made and supported claims about Lyndon Johnson's "frightening" ties with the "dangerous" Martin Luther King, by quoting Bill Buckley and other conservatives, saying, "What did Martin Luther King engage in? Bullying banks and other businesses. Intimidation tactics. Disruption of business. King forced businesses to serve unsavory individuals who scared away their long-time customers, threatening their very existence today."

Just one thing: Barry Goldwater didn't do that.  But he could have.  It's a character thing.  John McCain just wouldn't understand.

What's It All Mean

The above is hardly meant to be exhaustive.  Everywhere you look in the rightwing attacks against ACORN as well as Obama you find lie after distortion, after half-truth, after wild speculation, after dubious opinion.  But what's the big picture here?

A fully fleshed-out answer will have to wait for another diary, but the bottom line is simple, really:  Our political discourse is entirely unhinged from reality, and they are doing absolutely everything they can to take advantage of that fact.  All that matters is that an accusation be made.  It doesn't matter on whit if it's true or not.

Bill Clinton killed Vince Foster, don'tcha know?

Get ready, folks, because that's just where we're headed, come January 20.

The alternative-detailed, informative, factual reporting-has been so thoroughly marginalized that it's regarded as some detestable form of elitist snobbery.  But how else is one to understand what actually did go on to create the current financial crisis?  As I've argued many times in the past, conservative discourse depends on and reflects a level of cognitive develpment that can't handle such complexity.  However, there are ways of explaining complex subjects in simplified terms that get the essential point across.  This is what George Soros did on Bill Moyers Journal last Friday, as discussed in my diary here.  It's not impossible to do this.  It just takes dedication, some skill, more training and practice, but above all the political will to build a social and political order based on truth and justice, rather than on lies, lies, lies and more lies.