There has been a call from the McCain Presidential campaign and many on the political right to have Sen. Barack Obama explain his alleged ties to ACORN. McCain has even alleged that ACORN is working to “steal our democracy” and we have already the reports of voter registration fraud, etc.
Most Americans have probably never heard of ACORN and those who have may have gotten the impression that this grassroots community organization only exists to steal elections from the GOP.
So, before I tell you that I used to work for ACORN and have had mixed feelings over the years towards the organization, I would like to first explain to you what ACORN is and does.
The Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) is a grassroots community organization with chapters all over the country. It exists primarily in urban areas where it organizes in communities populated by the working poor. Some of the major issues that ACORN has worked on over the recent years have included the promotion of a living-wage, fighting predatory lending and redlining, health-care reform, and tenant’s rights. In many instances ACORN has also worked closely with labor. In all of these issues ACORN strictly focuses on class and labor issues and thus is an organization I see as having an important role to play in keeping the feet of the Democratic Party to the fire and to keep in check the cultural liberals in the Party who want to move away from issues of racial and economic justice to a Party that is more yuppie centered powered by the “netroots”.
I worked as a community organizer for ACORN in St. Louis and also for very brief stints in Brooklyn and Paterson, NJ. Organizers for ACORN work 60 to 70 hours a week meeting members and trying to recruit new members for low pay in order to serve the communities they are organizing. It is an often thankless job and you deal with a lot of rejection and hostility but at the end of the day the organizer can take solace in the fact they are helping to make our communities better for those most in need.
ACORN community organizers work in communities with few Republicans, often with few whites, and thus are seen as hostile by the GOP who sees any political organizing in these communities as automatically a threat to their interests.
The recent controversy has to do with voter registration and has been totally misrepresented by the media and McCain. As a part of voter registration drives ACORN will offer hire contracted workers to register voters. Sometimes these workers will have quotas to work with or they will be paid on a per registration basis. As you have bad apples in every barrel there are some who will not do the right thing. In this case it means that instead of doing the hard work to register voters some will just fill out the lists with fictitious names. This is not something promoted by ACORN, as it has no value and these fictitious people cant vote anyway, and it is more the case of lazy people deciding to spend the day at the mall or at a fast food joint filling out forms than out on the street. It is not activity backed or endorsed by ACORN and it will hold zero sway over the November election. The attacks by the GOP are based solely on their fear of all of the new voters who are going to be coming out in November.
As I said earlier my thoughts on ACORN have changed over the years. I had been highly critical of the organization for hiring and being ran by, almost exclusively, white liberals from privileged backgrounds who are very culturally disconnected from the communities they work in no matter how many times they have read Fanon and how many Marvin Gaye albums they have. This is still a criticism that I have of ACORN and a reason I feel it is not more effective; but the fact of the matter is that on a grassroots level no organization is consistently fighting for the poor in the political arena. This becomes increasingly important as more affluent people join the Democratic Party over social issues and as Ryan Lizza of the New Yorker has advocated the Party needs to cater more to them and less to the poor making ACORN even more important.
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