ACORNgate threatens Obama's Lead
Over the past few days, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or ACORN, has come under scrutiny across in a dozen battleground states regarding their voter registration activities. The most high profile government move to date in this election against ACORN is the FBI’s raiding of Nevada’s ACORN office last week. Today, the scrutiny on ACORN’s voter registration methods continued with election board hearings in all-important Cuyhoga County, Ohio, which encompasses Cleveland.
Tomorrow, the next shoe will drop as a lawsuit in Ohio will initiate a wide-ranging RICO action against ACORN and its subsidiaries. RICO is the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act and it provides for extended penalties for criminal acts performed as part of an ongoing criminal organization while also providing a civil cause of action for those injured by violations of the act. The “organization” is ACORN and its subsidiaries, and the criminal acts are the forgery of voter signatures as reported in various states nationwide.
The Obama campaign’s response to the GOP claims of ACORN ties has been uneven at best to date. First, via the “Fight the Smears” website, Obama claimed that he never trained any ACORN workers nor worked for or with ACORN at any time. Almost immediately, evidence of Obama’s representation of ACORN in a voter registration lawsuit in the mid-90’s and multiple published reports of Obama’s training of ACORN organizers surfaced, along with evidence of an $800,000.00 payment to an ACORN subsidary from the Obama campaign this summer. A video of Obama himself stating he’d worked side by side with ACORN for years and will do so indefinitely also reinforced his longstanding ties. Predictably, Obama’s website was then alterered to state that Obama was never a paid employee of ACORN, implicitly conceding the misrepresentations of the initial statement denying any Obama ties to ACORN.
With the new high profile RICO action coming tomorrow, “ACORNgate” could be the first major scandal of the general election. Before now, both Obama’s (Ayers, Wright, Rezko) and McCain’s (Keating) scandals have been rehashings from either the primaries or past campaigns. How the Obama campaign deals with the coming media firestorm tomorrow upon the filing of the action against ACORN could decide the election as ACORNgate may be the last, best chance for McCain to gain traction against Obama in the presidential race.
The effect on the presidential race is could be significant. Centrists and independent voters have little tolerance for explicit fraud by either side in electioneering. Obama is pulling away from McCain in the head-to-head national race presently, now standing at his highest lead of the campaign of about 7%. If McCain can effectively tie Obama to ACORN, those independents and centrists now leaning to Obama may take a second look at McCain and put the race back to a dead even contest going into the final few weeks of the campaign.