By Matthew Vadum ——Bio and Archives--October 9, 2008
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Obama started building the base years before. For instance, ACORN noticed him when he was organizing on the far south side of the city with the Developing Communities Project. He was a very good organizer. When he returned from law school, we asked him to help us with a lawsuit to challenge the state of Illinois’ refusal to abide by the National Voting Rights Act, also known as motor voter. Allied only with the state of Mississippi, Illinois had been refusing to allow mass-based voter registration according to the new law. Obama took the case, known as ACORN vs. Edgar (the name of the Republican governor at the time) and we won. Obama then went on to run a voter registration project with Project VOTE in 1992 that made it possible for Carol Moseley Braun to win the Senate that year. Project VOTE delivered 50,000 newly registered voters in that campaign (ACORN delivered about 5000 of them). Since then, we have invited Obama to our leadership training sessions to run the session on power every year, and, as a result, many of our newly developing leaders got to know him before he ever ran for office. Thus, it was natural for many of us to be active volunteers in his first campaign for State Senate and then his failed bid for U.S. Congress in 1996. By the time he ran for U.S. Senate, we were old friends. And along about early March, we started to see that the African-American community had made its move: when Sen. Obama’s name was mentioned at our Southside Summit meeting with 700 people in attendance from three southside communities, the crowd went crazy. With about a week to go before the election, it was very clear how the African-American community would vote. But would they vote in high enough numbers? It seemed to us that what Obama needed in the March primary was what we always work to deliver anyway: increased turnout in our ACORN communities. ACORN is active on the south and west sides of Chicago, in the south suburbs and on the east side of Springfield, the state capital. Most of the turf where we organize in is African American, with a growing Latino presence in Chicago’s Little Village and the suburbs. [emphasis added above]So Obama was right there in the thick of things, organizing for ACORN/Project Vote, representing ACORN in court at its specific invitation and leading ACORN training seminars. It’s worth noting that groups on the extreme left, such as ACORN’s Project Vote, often have many tentacles. That’s the way they organize themselves. They often have overlapping memberships and interlocking directorates. They align themselves in strategic coalitions all the time. Sometimes they have formal mergers and sometimes they have strategic partnerships. This is their modus operandi. Interestingly, Foulkes’s article can no longer be accessed online. The website for Social Policy now denies access to that specific article while apparently allowing access to all other articles. Look at the teaser for the article on the Social Policy website (visit there yourself by clicking here – free subscription required for access to archives): The titles of articles that are available are highlighted in a brownish color. The title of the Foulkes article, however, appears in black letters indicating that access has been denied. Guess who’s behind Social Policy magazine? Something called The Institute for Social Justice. The website indicates the address of the magazine is 1024 Elysian Fields Avenue, New Orleans, Louisiana 70117. Here is a screen grab of the address from the website: Guess who else lives in Elysian Fields? ACORN. Go to Sweetness & Light blog and scroll down to the Form 990s (tax returns for nonprofits) and you will see that both ACORN and Project Vote report the same address, 1024 Elysian Fields Avenue, New Orleans, Louisiana 70117. There is also more evidence of the close relationship between Project Vote and ACORN in 1992. We did find this item on Nexis from The Hotline dated October 8, 1992. The short article is called “VOTER REGISTRATION: PROJECT VOTE! TARGETS URBAN SWING AREAS.” It begins:
Sandy Newman, exec. dir of Project VOTE!, a national non-partisan, non-profit voter participation organization which targets African-American communities, announced that registration efforts have added “over a half million” new voters to the rolls — “most of them in swing presidential states with close Senate races,” including IL, PA, MI, OH, NY, CA, MD and CT.It indicates that in New York City in October 1992 Project Vote was either part of or closely aligned with ACORN. The exact wording of the relevant paragraph is:
NY: In NYC, Project VOTE! with ACORN and the NY Public Interest Research Group, added more than 90,000 voters (Project VOTE! release, 10/5).A recent article by Lynn Sweet of the Chicago Tribune (Oct. 6) also lumps ACORN and Project Vote circa 1992 together:
In 1992, Barack Obama worked for Project Vote for about seven months; now Project Vote and ACORN–a coalition of community organizations serving low income families–just wrapped up a voter registration drive targeting battleground states Obama needs to win the White House. Though officially non-partisan, the focus of the ACORN/Project Vote voter drive was on groups leaning Democratic in the presidential contest: African American, young, Latino and low income earners.Maybe Sweet didn’t get the memo from the HuffPost.
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Matthew Vadum, matthewvadum.blogspot.com, is an investigative reporter.
His new book Subversion Inc. can be bought at Amazon.com (US), Amazon.ca (Canada)
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