Joshua Malbin

As I’ve said before, community development groups will be careful to steer clear of politics from now on, leaving poor people more politically disengaged than they would otherwise be. This continues to suck big-time.

Incidentally, the O’Keefe video that started all this has been exposed as a hoax. Not that you’d ever have known it from the papers.

The BRAD BLOG also has a PDF account of the work ACORN did over the last decade and won’t be around to do anymore.

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I worried about this last year when John McCain repeated the banshee wails about ACORN’s supposed voter fraud: by legitimizing the crazies’ paranoia about ACORN for his own short-term gain, he’d permanently affixed a “controversial” label to the organization. Before long Democrats would back away from them, and that would be bad for a group that does great antipoverty work.

It took less than a year. As we’ve all seen by now:

Majorities of Senate and House Democrats voted Thursday in favor of separate Republican proposals to block federal funding for the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now.

The unsurprising result:

Community-organizing group Acorn said Thursday it was considering quitting its voter-registration work amid a growing political storm over its activities, a move that could hurt Democrats at the polls.

And it’s not just ACORN. Be sure that every other community-development and community-organizing group in the country has taken note and will think very carefully before dipping its toe into politics, even something like voter registration that should be seen as an absolute public good. Yes this will hurt Democrats. I couldn’t give less of a crap about that. The Democratic Party as an institution has earned none of my loyalty. I do care that it will make poor people even less politically engaged and even more powerless than they would otherwise be. That sucks.

(A couple of side notes: Conservatives have disliked ACORN for many years for its antipoverty work, even before it began large-scale voter registration. And of course anyone who registers poor people to vote must hate Republicans, because Republicans couldn’t ever try to convince poor people to vote for them.)

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