Opinion
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Reflections on the ACORN story
By: Michael Barone
Senior Political Analyst
09/18/09 3:44 PM EDT
I posted my analysis of the 345-75 vote in the House to defund ACORN yesterday, and Byron York provides an excellent analysis of the issue today. But I have to say that I am still stunned by the conduct that filmmaker James O'Keefe and his sidekick Hannah Giles documented at several ACORN offices. Of course I was familiar with the plentiful charges of vote fraud by ACORN affiliates, documented by John Fund of the Wall Street Journal over the years, and National Review’s Jim Geraghty helpfully collects some past stories about ACORN employees’ illegal behavior in Ohio, Wisconsin and New Mexico—all target states in the 2004 and 2008 elections. Geraghty also notes that ACORN shares offices in Snohomish County, Washington, with the local Democratic party and AFL-CIO. And that Congressman Rick Larsen, who represents most of Snohomish County, was one of the 75 Democrats who voted against defunding ACORN yesterday. By the way, Larsen’s district voted only 56%-42% for Barack Obama, and if I were running the Republicans’ House campaign committee I’d be busy on the phone recruiting a candidate. This district has been spinning leftward, but it did elect Republican Jack Metcalf in 1994, 1996 and 1998. I don’t think supporting ACORN is going to be a strong positive issue for Larsen in Skagit and Whatcom Counties.
But back to ACORN. What stuns me is that, for all my knowledge of ACORN employees’ illegal behavior, it never would have occurred to me that so many of them would blithely collaborate in encouraging prostitution—and child prostitution at that! One ACORN defender said, in effect, well, that’s what you get when you hire low-income people; but I refuse to believe that that’s standard operating procedure even in the most disadvantaged of demographics. What is it about the culture of ACORN that makes collaboration in prostitution standard operating procedure? No wonder that 67% of voters have an unfavorable view of ACORN, according to pollster Scott Rasmussen. One wonders about the 15% who have positive views—an even lower percentage than the 17% of House members who voted against defunding ACORN.
The Washington Post news pages, curiously, look for explanations in other quarters. They’re less interested in the culture of ACORN than in the motivations of filmmaker James O’Keefe and his colleague Hannah Giles, who posed as pimp and prostitute in ACORN headquarters and provided the resulting videos to Andrew Breitbart’s Big Government website. The Post’s Thursday news story (headlined “ACORN to review incidents”) helpfully identifies Giles as “the eldest daughter of a conservative Christian minister in Miami.” (Questions for the reporter: Does it make any difference that she’s the eldest rather than, say, the second eldest? On what basis do you characterize the minister as conservative, and why is that relevant? You characterize the minister as “Christian,” but aren’t all ministers in the U.S. Christian, or are you just trying to distinguish him from a cabinet minister?) The Post’s
Friday story (“The $1,300 mission to fell ACORN”) reads as if the reporters were assigned to find out what nefarious right-wing outfit financed their operation and came up empty. They did manage to include two paragraphs on the beliefs on Giles’s father, apparently on the theory that it illuminates her motivation. Then it segues to an account by ACORN sources of how the two were thrown out of an ACORN office in Philadelphia when they mentioned 13-year-olds (but not when they mentioned prostitution?). I guess the idea is to discredit Giles and by inference O’Keefe as religious fanatics whose motivations should lead readers to disregard what’s on their videos.
The Post, like almost all of “mainstream media,” waddled in late on this story. I remember one time in the 1980s when the Wall Street Journal beat the Post was beaten on a story based on public information in Montgomery County, Maryland, court files. Ben Bradlee, the executive editor of the Post at the time, did not whine as New York Times managing editor Jill Abramson did on the ACORN story about how the bureau was short-staffed and, gee, it’s hard to stay on top of every story. Bradlee was furious—scooped in our own backyard!—and as I recall heads fell. But that was then and this is now. “Mainstream media” is complacent about suppressing a story that is embarrassing to the Obama administration and the Democratic party, and its response after getting scooped is to waddle in with attempts to discredit it. Pathetic.
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