You Can Tell a Lot About People By Who They Choose to Demonize

The current conservative-generated hysteria over ACORN is a perfect example of everything that is wrong with both of our major political parties and the general state of our political discourse. Let's put aside for a moment the Glenn Beck-hyped "sting" videos of ACORN employees supposedly engaged in nefarious behavior (I'll get back to that in minute).  

First, let's take a step back and consider just what ACORN is.  It is a non-profit organization whose mission is to empower and improve the lives of poor people.  As with many other organizations, ACORN has a number of legally distinct parts, each of which has different sources of funding and engages in different kinds of activities (ACORN's conservative enemies routinely conflate these various parts to imply that ACORN is using federal money for improper political purposes). Since its founding the 70s, ACORN and its employees and volunteers have fought successfully to, among other things, increase minimum wages across the country, increase the quality of public education in poor areas, and protect people from predatory lending practices. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, ACORN helped rebuild thousands of homes and assisted victims in relocating and finding housing outside of New Orleans. The ACORN activity that has drawn the most conservative ire is its voter registration efforts which, consistent with ACORN's mission, are primarily aimed at low-income voters (who tend to vote Democratic).

Republicans have made a lot of breathless claims about ACORN-related voter fraud, most of which do not hold up to investigation or scrutiny. Now Glenn Beck and his minions are hyping a series of "sting" videos taped by conservative activists posing as pimps and prostitutes. As an initial matter, it is worth noting that these videos were shot and edited by people with a clear political agenda. We'll see how this plays out, but having watched the videos, it would not surprise me if they have been edited so as to severely distort and misrepresent what actually happened. The videos do not show a dialogue; the film-makers intersperse their own representations as to what they said with the supposed responses of the ACORN workers. I suspect that they are edited in this way to remove necessary context and make these conversations look worse than they actually were. The ACORN office in California is claiming exactly that, that the employee captured on film was playing along with what she assumed was a joke (and having watched the video, that seems perfectly plausible). I suspect the unedited footage looks very different. Moreover, I virtually guarantee that for every one of these videos aired, there were numerous attempted "stings" in which employees acted appropriately and therefore didn't provide any good footage.

But even if you take these film-makers at face value and assume the worst, the reality is that ACORN has thousands of employees and the vast majority of them spend their days trying to help poor people through perfectly legal means (and receive very little compensation for doing so). Even before yesterday's Senate vote, the amount of federal money that went to ACORN was very small. This is a relatively insignificant organization in the grand scheme of things, but it's an organization that has unquestionably fought over the years to improve the lives of the less fortunate in this country.

That the GOP and its conservative supporters would single out this particular organization for such intense demonization is telling. In September of last year, the entire world came perilously close to complete financial catastrophe. We're still not out of the woods and we're deep within one of the worst recessions in U.S. history. This situation was brought about by the recklessness and greed of our banks and financial institutions, most of which had to be bailed out at enormous cost to the American taxpayer (exponentially more than all of the tax dollars given to ACORN over the years). The people who brought about this near catastrophe, for the most, profited immensely from it. These very same institutions, propped up by the American taxpayer, are once again raking in large profits.

But rather than focus their anger on these folks, conservatives choose to go after an organization composed almost entirely of low-paid community organizers, an organization that could never hope to have even a small fraction of the clout or the ability to affect the overall direction of the country that Wall Street bankers have. ACORN's relative lack of political influence was on full display yesterday, when the U.S. Senate (in which Democrats have a supermajority) not only entertained a vote to defund ACORN, but approved it by a huge margin (with only seven Democrats opposing).

Meanwhile, with a Democratic President elected on a mandate to reform health care and large Democratic majorities in both chambers of Congress, the prospect of meaningful health care reform passing remains doubtful. Why? Because such reform is opposed by very influential lobbies, groups that--unlike ACORN--have the money and the clout to actually affect the lives of average Americans in significant ways.

But thanks to the Glenn Becks of the world, ACORN has now been so demonized that its future as an organization is in doubt. Never fear, though, I'm sure Beck will find some other obscure powerless group to demonize soon.