The idea that ACORN is a socialist front group is hardly unprecedented, including among socialists. An influential theorist of community organizing has made largely the same claim. In his 1980 essay “Socialist Incubators” Peter Dreier argued that a variety of community organizations—ACORN prominent among them—were pushing a series of concrete reforms that added up to a step-by-step socialist program for the United States, even if that fact hadn’t yet dawned on the full membership of these groups.4 A leading figure in the Democratic Socialists of America, Dreier went on to develop an influential behind-the-scenes relationship with ACORN, helping to guide the group’s assault on the banking system.
The pattern here reaches back to ACORN’s predecessor group from the sixties, the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO). Marxist theorists Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven helped to found that group and guided it with a strategy derived from communist organizing techniques of the 1930s. NWRO sought a socialist transformation of the United States. The idea was to flood state and local welfare systems with more applicants than they could possibly afford to carry. Cloward and Piven believed that this “break the bank” strategy would force President Johnson and a liberal Democratic Congress to bail out overburdened state welfare systems with a federally guaranteed annual income.5
Yet Cloward and Piven weren’t particularly interested in open socialist proselytism. True, they believed that as welfare recipients shed traditional American notions of self-sufficiency and learned to demand government support as their right, a kind of de facto anti- capitalist mentality would take hold. For Cloward and Piven, however, socialist transformation depended less on conscious ideological conversion of the poor than on stoking their sense of entitlement and rage. This picture—of sophisticated Marxist strategists guiding activist organizers (some socialist and some not) and a larger body of ideologically unselfconscious members—is the very image of a socialist front group.
ACORN carried this pattern forward to the seventies and beyond, although the new organization was vastly more cautious about advertising its socialist subtext than NWRO had been. Cloward and Piven published their famous “break the bank” strategy openly in The Nation magazine in 1966, and explained their Communist-inspired machinations in detail in their 1977 book, Poor People’s Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail.6 These two socialist strategists continued to advise ACORN behind the scenes, along with socialist colleagues like Dreier.7 In the eighties and nineties, however, you’d need to attend a Socialist Scholars Conference or read an obscure journal like Social Policy to grasp the Marxist character of community organizing. Stealth was the order of the day.
With a bit of digging, however, it’s possible to see clearly the underlying ideology of ACORN’s leadership. A series of memos and articles from 1979 suggests that ACORN’s leadership was drawing on the work of Marxist theorist Andre Gorz to develop their long-term strategy. Gorz’s writings have a special appeal for socialist community organizers, and we saw in the last chapter that the leaders of the Midwest Academy frequently assigned writings by Gorz. A 1979 internal memo from Danny Cantor, then ACORN’s head organizer in St. Louis, explicitly draws on Gorz’s notion of “non-reformist reforms” as a model for ACORN’s work. Cantor went on to co-found the ACORN-sponsored New Party, with which Obama ran during his first political campaign in 1996. Today, Cantor heads New York State’s controversial Working Families Party, founded in close association with ACORN.8
Cantor’s memo was dated February 1979, so it’s of interest that Peter Dreier’s influential paper on Gorz, “The Case for Transitional Reform,” came out in the January–February issue of Social Policy in 1979. (We learned in Chapter Two that Dreier convened a panel on community organizing at the Cooper Union Socialist Scholars Conference where Obama was converted to the profession.) Drawing on Gorz, Dreier’s overall strategy was to first establish quasi-socialist institutions at the heart of capitalist society—ACORN’s role in the banking system very much fitting the bill. In the short run, these de facto socialist groups would push society toward gradual “democratic” change. In the long run, perhaps, they’d serve as the vanguard of a revolution. The second part of Dreier’s strategy was to inject “unmanageable strains into the capitalist system, strains that precipitate an economic and/or political crisis,” by which Dreier meant a “revolution of rising entitlements” that “cannot be abandoned without undermining the legitimacy of the capitalist class.” In the short run, Dreier said, “the process leads to expansion of state activity and budgets, and … to fiscal crisis in the public sector. In the longer run, it may give socialist norms an opportunity for extension or at least visibility.”
Given the dates of Dreier’s article and Cantor’s memo, it would seem that Cantor invoked Gorz under the influence of Dreier’s essay. Cantor apparently misspelled Gorz as “Gortz,” another indication that he was drawing on Dreier’s Social Policy piece, and not on his own reading of Gorz.9
It’s also of interest that the September–October 1979 issue of Social Policy features an article called “ACORN: Taking Advantage of the Fiscal Crisis.” The piece was jointly written by ACORN’s chief organizer, Wade Rathke, ACORN’s director of research, Seth Borgos, and ACORN’s campaign coordinator, Gary Delgado. Published only months after the Dreier piece, this essay by ACORN’s top leadership reads like a response to Dreier that shouts “Me, too!” Neither Dreier nor socialism are explicitly mentioned, yet the message ACORN’s leadership brings across in this piece is that the seemingly specific and immediate reforms they organize around are ultimately intended to challenge “the structural foundation of society from which unequal distribution of goods and services derives.” Referring to the economic woes of the late Carter administration, ACORN’s leaders say: “We view the fiscal crisis … as an opportunity to seize power for low- and moderate-income people,” and an opportunity to “project a vision of a new society to our constituency.”
In short, in late 1979, ACORN’s top leadership announced in Social Policy, the key forum for the socialist intelligentsia of American community organizing, that they were on board with the sort of program articulated by Dreier months before. The content and timing of the Cantor memo suggests that ACORN’s leadership was directly inspired by Dreier’s piece. It’s probably no coincidence, then, that Peter Dreier had an important advisory role in ACORN’s subsequent banking campaign, and arguably served as ACORN’s most vocal public defender during the organization’s post-2008 period of crisis.10
In sum, between the subterranean socialism of the leadership’s writings and Dreier’s behind-the-scenes work with the organization, ACORN fits the pattern of a socialist front group.
In their piece for Social Policy, ACORN’s leadership points to what they call a “People’s Platform” as one of the tools they use to “project a vision of a new society” to their constituency. ACORN adopted this People’s Platform, the most systematic public expression we have of ACORN’s political ideology, at its 1979 convention in St. Louis.11 The creation of that platform was part of a four-year plan, initiated in 1976, to inject ACORN into national politics. In that 1976 memo, ACORN toyed with the idea of running its own presidential candidate in 1980.12 That never happened, of course (not in 1980, anyway), but in the late seventies and early eighties, ACORN did begin to operate an inside/outside strategy on the Democratic Party. ACORN ran delegates to Democratic conventions and pushed platform planks, while pressuring the party from outside with its trademark aggressive protests. ACORN may have taken longer than the Midwest Academy to worm its way into the heart of the Democratic Party, yet it started earlier and finished stronger.
The adoption of the People’s Platform in 1979, along with ACORN’s increasing focus on national politics, was noticed by America’s socialists. In the pages of the DSOC newsletter, Democratic Left, many planks from ACORN’s People’s Platform were itemized, including the creation of a public energy corporation to compete with private companies, a national health-care system controlled by neighborhood committees, strong laws mandating low-income lending, reserved seats for low-income people on the boards of banks, and others planks along the same lines. While acknowledging ACORN’s self-portrayal as “pragmatic” and “non-ideological,” Democratic Left made it clear that ACORN’s platform was socialist in all but name:
Democratic socialists must participate in and support [ACORN’s] efforts, not as ideological outsiders with a separate agenda, but as committed allies in the same struggle.13
The internal “discussion bulletin” of NAM, the other major democratic socialist organization of the late seventies (shortly to merge with DSOC), came to the same conclusion:
ACORN is not simply a neo-Rooseveltian tendency in the Democratic Party. ACORN is an integral part of the evolving forces of socialism, even if not consciously so [emphasis original] … it is an organization of people’s power in the communities, and is thus central to the institutional framework of a future democratic socialism … NAM chapters should work in and with ACORN as much as possible in cities where community organizing is a major focus of our work.14
The author seems to have underestimated the extent to which the top leadership of ACORN, if not the majority of foot soldiers, was aware of the group’s underlying socialist message. Despite its democratic pose, ACORN’s socialist-friendly leaders pulled the organization’s strings—another reason it makes sense to see ACORN as a front group.
After the adoption of its People’s Platform in 1979, ACORN geared up to run delegates to the 1980 Democratic National Convention. The goal was to inject elements of their newly formed program into the national Democratic platform. After years of effort, Michael Harrington’s Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee (DSOC) had successfully captured about a quarter of the seats on the 1980 Democratic platform committee. So ACORN and DSOC formed an alliance to shape the program of the national Democratic Party.15
Another indicator of ACORN’s ideology is the leadership’s strong sense of continuity with American socialist history. The first ACORN handbook for new organizers, published in 1976–77, features ACORN leader Wade Rathke’s tribute to H. L. Mitchell, leader of the Southern Tenant Farmer’s Union (STFU).16 STFU was an Arkansas socialist group from the 1930s that Rathke saw as a predecessor of sorts to ACORN (which also started in Arkansas). Rathke’s handbook piece highlights STFU’s Socialist Party origins, and includes a picture of Mitchell with early Socialist Party leader Norman Thomas. ACORN has carefully avoided the socialist label in public, yet its internal training material gets the ideological message across, not least to novice organizers with eyes to see.
SECTION TWO
In February of 2010, the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform issued a staff report under the leadership of Ranking Member Darrell Issa (R-CA). The report was called “Follow the Money: ACORN, SEIU and their Political Allies.”17 The report “found there was no real separation between ACORN and its affiliates. ACORN is a single corrupt corporate enterprise composed of a series of holding companies and subsidiaries that are financially and operationally dependent upon the main corporation.”18 Chicago-based SEIU (Service Employees International Union) Local 880 is specifically cited by the report as an example of the substantial intertwining of ACORN and its SEIU affiliates, which involves not only financial but political “codependence.”19 Obama had dealings with both Chicago ACORN and SEIU Local 880, so it’s important to keep in mind that separate identities notwithstanding, SEIU 880 is in reality a part of ACORN.
The Issa staff report’s first finding was: “ACORN and SEIU’s illegal agreements, and the crimes committed in furtherance of these agreements, constitutes a criminal conspiracy.”20 In this connection, the report noted the existence of “hundreds of ACORN bank accounts, shell organizations incorporated under different sections of the internal revenue code, and even an ACORN controlled accounting firm (Citizen’s Consulting Inc.) that helps ACORN obscure the true use of charitable donations and taxpayer funds.”21 ACORN’s records will allow us to see from the inside the organization’s extraordinary capacity for spinning off groups meant to disguise its own controlling role.
It’s critical to keep this pattern in mind when trying to make sense of Obama’s own ties to ACORN. ACORN’s facility for manufacturing and quietly orchestrating the work of multiple organizations extends beyond financial matters, into the political realm. I take no position here on the alleged crimes outlined in the Issa report. But I do want to show that Obama’s ties to SEIU Local 880, the New Party, a group called “Progressive Chicago,” and Project Vote all ultimately lead back to ACORN. In a sense, ACORN’s apparent capacity for creating financial “shell organizations” is an extension of and variation on its predilection for spinning off political front groups. Up to now, these layers within layers of affiliated groups have obscured the extent of Obama’s involvement with ACORN.
The records of Chicago-based Illinois ACORN at the Wisconsin Historical Society, which extend from Illinois ACORN’s founding in 1983 to about 1994, are filled with indications of the group’s trademark hardball tactics. For the most part, the Illinois records (unlike ACORN’s more extensive national records) are confined to yearly reports, meeting minutes, and newspaper clippings, with only the occasional lengthy memo. Undoubtedly, Chicago ACORN leaders communicated mostly in person or over the phone, whereas ACORN’s scattered national leaders more often had to resort to memos. Even so, the Illinois records provide fascinating glimpses of Chicago ACORN’s modus operandi.
Chicago ACORN board minutes from 1984 describe an action against Illinois governor James Thompson: “We caught him by surprise, and demanded that he support the Affordable Budget Plan. He agreed to investigate and meet with us again. (At first he had said he would not meet at all, but after 200 people surrounded him at a ceremony, he changed his mind.)”22 A 1984 Great Lakes Regional Report says of ACORN’s Chicago branch: “the work-in at the Options Exchange and the take-over of a utility hearing were good, militant actions that finally got us into one of the dailies, for the first time in our nine months.”23 A month later, Chicago ACORN leader Madeline Talbott was self-critical: “We failed to produce enough troops to mess up opening day of the Options Exchange in our jobs campaign, and failed to produce enough political pressure to stop them from cutting the opening [d]ay ribbon.”24
ACORN Chicago’s January 1985 year end report includes tidbits like, “We took over the [utility rate] hearing and had a fine time.”25 A 1988 annual report lists as a failing “too many hit and run actions without enough follow-up.”26 Illinois ACORN’s files are dotted with the occasional arrest record and notations about court appearances resulting from its “direct action” campaigns.27 Chicago ACORN leader Madeline Talbott’s personal spiral notebooks, while mostly filled with appointments and addresses, include occasional reflections of interest: “Anger is a tactic/100 go wild/can take the heat, want the impact/small room: don’t lose control of anger/they will too/always try to take away strongest tools in negotiating.”28
In his 2008 history of Chicago-based SEIU Local 880 (very much a part of ACORN), 880’s head organizer, Keith Kelleher, stresses the special role of Alinskyite direct-action tactics in his local’s campaigns. According to Kelleher, SEIU Local 880 used “guerilla tactics that included sending busloads of members to the home of owners and managers.”29 With pride, Kelleher adds that these tactics “inflicted a degree of reputational damage on primary and secondary targets of a wholly different nature than typical labour-management fights at that point in America’s history.”30
We’ve seen that national ACORN began moving into politics in the late seventies. By the early eighties, when ACORN arrived in Chicago, the traditional aversion of Alinskyite organizers to electoral politics was well on the way out. SEIU 880, for example, focused on organizing home health-care workers, many of whom were employed by the Illinois Department of Rehabilitation Services (DORS). So SEIU ran plenty of “actions” against state officials. Busing protesters to the state capital of Springfield in 1985, for example, 880 “seized the front doors” of DORS and “marched, singing and chanting, into the offices of the department secretary.”31 SEIU 880 used these protests to persuade Illinois to eliminate competitive bidding on home health-care contracts, thus raising wages with pre-set rates.32
All of which provides some context for our upcoming examination of Barack Obama’s work with Illinois ACORN and SEIU 880 when he ran Illinois Project Vote in 1992. Kelleher emphasizes that 880’s work with Obama’s Project Vote in 1992 allowed the union to “build and cement” an important relationship with the future state senator.33 The implication is that Obama’s later work in the Illinois State Senate was of use to SEIU 880 on the myriad issues tying it to the state. So a great deal more than voter registration was at stake in Obama’s work with ACORN and SEIU in 1992. That was simply one moment in a long-term political alliance in which ACORN/SEIU provided political troops to Obama, while receiving foundation funding and legislative help from the future president.
When Obama first arrived in Chicago in 1985, ACORN’s push for subprime lending was in its infancy. The focus of Chicago ACORN’s housing campaign in the mid-eighties was squatting. Protesters would break into abandoned homes, seize them for designated ACORN members, and begin to make repairs. A picture in the April 8, 1989, Chicago Tribune, for example, shows a group of ACORN protesters with bullhorn and crowbar prominently displayed.34 That protest appears to have melted away when police arrived, but other squatting efforts had more success. Sometimes neighbors were happy to see an abandoned property taken over and fixed, and sometimes banks under pressure agreed to hand foreclosed properties over to ACORN. Pointing to an obscure and unenforced statute, ACORN claimed exemption from arrest for criminal trespass on the grounds that they were beautifying abandoned property.35 Yet the group also pushed for new legislation that would explicitly legalize their “homesteading.”36 In a 1986 article, Chicago ACORN leader Madeline Talbott concedes the illegal character of the squatting campaign and emphasizes her care in trying “not to let people squat in really high risk situations.”37
Why, exactly, was ACORN squatting? If the group wanted homesteading legislation, why not fight for it through conventional political channels and stop the illegal seizures? This apparently reasonable question totally misses the Alinskyite point. In part, ACORN wanted those houses because the hope of being selected as an “owner” brought new recruits into the organization. ACORN works by appropriating goods from businesses or the state, then doling them out as a way of luring in new members. This is another “polarizing” Alinskyite win/win, of the type favored by Obama’s organizing mentors. If ACORN seizes a house and gets to keep it, the organization wins. But if politicians or businesses step in and prevent a seizure, anger spreads among the squatters (stirred up by ACORN’s organizers, of course), who are bound that much more closely to the group by their rage. So going the respectable route, and calling for homesteading legislation won’t do. ACORN feeds off high-risk actions that push the limits of the law.
There’s something else involved as well. In his history of ACORN’s early years, Gary Delgado assigns squatting an ideological meaning. Recall that Delgado was an author, along with Wade Rathke, of “ACORN: Taking Advantage of the Fiscal Crisis,” the 1979 article that communicated ACORN’s de facto socialist sympathies and bragged about the group’s ability to “project a vision of a new society to our constituency.” Delgado helped organize and author ACORN’s “People’s Platform,” and in his history of ACORN he is clearly miffed that the platform couldn’t be even more explicitly radical than it was. So Delgado points to ACORN’s squatting campaign as proof of the group’s genuinely skeptical attitude toward the idea of private property.38 In other words, ACORN’s squatting campaign was socialist in practice. Property was literally confiscated “from below” and dispersed to the poor. With its organized squatting, ACORN really was projecting a vision of a new society to its constituents. And that vision was decidedly not capitalist.
We know that Obama first made contact with Chicago ACORN through its leader Madeline Talbott. Talbott was a powerful figure within the organization, serving as director of ACORN’s Great Lakes/Prairie Region branch and playing a major role in ACORN’s national campaigns.39 A 2008 Newsday article by Letta Taylor and Keith Herbert on Obama’s early organizing—especially his role in the asbestos campaign—says that Talbott “initially considered Obama a competitor. But she became so impressed with his work that she invited him to help train her staff.”40
What exactly does this mean? While Obama doesn’t show up in the Illinois ACORN/SEIU 800 archives until 1992, it’s possible to put together at least a plausible picture of what Obama’s initial contacts with ACORN might have involved. The key is to follow archived accounts of the Altgeld Tenants United (ATU), the local ACORN group active at the Altgeld Gardens public housing project where Obama did his initial organizing.
Altgeld Tenants United was closely allied with UNO of Chicago’s Mary Ellen Montes, who led a coalition of activists opposed to the expansion of area dumps run by Waste Management.41 Like ACORN, Montes and UNO favored hardball tactics, and ACORN’s files indicate participation in blockades at dumping sites around 1985, as well as arrests and court appearances related to those actions.42 Obama’s own Developing Communities Project was effectively an extension of UNO of Chicago, and Obama himself worked closely with Montes planning and carrying out an aggressive action against Waste Management in 1988.43 So ACORN was a core part of Obama’s organizing network from the start.
ATU appears to have been put together by ACORN organizer Steuart Pittman.44 ACORN’s national records show Pittman playing a leading role in ACORN’s banking campaigns of the nineties. Yet Pittman disappears from the ACORN Illinois records after early 1985. Perhaps he was transferred to another city. In any case, some-time shortly after Pittman’s departure, ATU fell on hard times. By 1986–87, the peak of Obama’s own activities at Altgeld, ATU, once one of ACORN’s strongest outposts, was listed as “a weak group.” The report added: “We have not found a way to move enough dues here to support an organizer.”45
Why the trouble? In the late eighties, Chicago ACORN was willing to live without a full staff of organizers for the sake of establishing an ACORN Housing Corporation and gearing up for a major housing-banking campaign.46 ACORN was beginning to wake up to the immense financial, political, and organizational opportunity represented by its mortgage campaigns. ACORN was willing to sacrifice other projects to get that housing effort into gear. By the 1988 year end report, however, ATU had snapped out of its dormancy and come to life. The report calls ATU “a recently reactivated group with a hot issue: asbestos.”47
So ACORN, which arrived in Chicago in 1983, was flourishing at Altgeld by 1984 and working closely with Obama’s future allies and mentors at UNO of Chicago by 1985, the year Obama himself arrived in Chicago. The departure of ATU’s original organizer, Steuart Pittman, appears to have weakened the group. Meanwhile Chicago ACORN’s increasing interest in housing and banking left it with a thinned-out and inexperienced field-organizing staff for several years. Altgeld Tenants United went dormant from 1986 to 1987, the very time Obama arrived at Altgeld and took his Developing Communities Project through its most celebrated actions.
It’s easy to see, then, why Chicago ACORN head Madeline Talbott “initially considered Obama a competitor” but later “became so impressed with his work that she invited him to help train her staff.” At a minimum, it would seem, Obama briefed ACORN staffers on his asbestos campaign so that they could revitalize ATU and carry on the battle after his departure in 1988.
In any case, we know that Obama and Talbott hit it off during his initial organizing stint, and that this bond became the basis of a deepening relationship with ACORN after Obama’s return to Chicago from law school and his work with Project Vote in 1992. Obama’s apparently generous cooperation with ACORN in the eighties makes perfect sense, given ACORN’s alliance with UNO of Chicago and Obama’s own ambitions. Obama wasn’t interested in freezing an organizing competitor out of Altgeld Gardens. On the contrary, he wanted to forge his own alliance with a group that could help him with future political campaigns. That turned out to be a very wise move.
SECTION THREE
“You’ve got only a couple thousand bucks in the bank. Your job pays you dog-food wages. Your credit history has been bent, stapled, and mutilated. You declared bankruptcy in 1989. Don’t despair: You can still buy a house.”48 So began an April 1995 article in the Chicago Sun-Times that went on to direct prospective home buyers fitting this profile to ACORN’s loan counseling program. Considered in the wake of the subprime mortgage crisis of 2008, encouraging customers like this to buy homes seems little short of madness. At the time, however, those who supported ACORN’s lending program saw it as both an embodiment of economic justice and a force for civil rights.
By 1995, when that Chicago newspaper article made its appearance, Barack Obama’s political fortunes were deeply entangled with ACORN. Gearing up for his first run for office in 1996, Obama was pouring money into ACORN’s coffers from his position on the board of two liberal Chicago foundations. By 1995, Obama had also been personally training ACORN leaders for some time. That same year, Obama represented ACORN in a lawsuit designed to force the state of Illinois to enforce the federal “Motor-Voter” bill. And while running formally on the Democratic Party ticket, Obama received the endorsement of—and almost certainly joined—the “New Party,” jointly controlled by Chicago ACORN and the Chicago Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). With ACORN members serving as foot soldiers in Obama’s first and subsequent political campaigns, the partnership was complete.
The year 1995 was also a culmination of sorts for ACORN’s intrusion into the financial system. By 1995, ACORN had solidly established its profitable loan counseling program, had helped to pull Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac into the subprime mortgage business, had established itself as a powerful partner of the Clinton administration on housing policy, and had helped to push subprime mortgage lending through the financial system as a whole.
The degree of ACORN’s involvement in the subprime mortgage crisis of 2008 is subject to debate. Skeptics argue that the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA), which ACORN used to force banks into making high-risk loans to low-credit customers, could have influenced at most only about a quarter of the loans at the base of the financial meltdown.49 It’s true that the crisis of 2008 was a confluence of many factors, and that CRA loans were only a piece of the puzzle. What the skeptics miss, however, is the degree to which ACORN served as a critical catalyst, using a combination of local protest actions and national lobbying to spread subprime lending far beyond the confines of CRA-controlled banks. ACORN may not have been the only cause of the subprime mortgage crisis, but a good deal of evidence points to its substantial role in laying the foundations of the debacle. While some of that evidence is already public, the archives of ACORN at the Wisconsin Historical Society shed considerable new light on this issue.
Obama clearly understood and supported the hardball tactics ACORN used in its campaign against Chicago’s banks. During the years 1992 through 1995, when Obama’s relationship to Chicago ACORN deepened, housing was the overwhelming focus of its work. During his initial organizing stint in Chicago, Obama likely helped ACORN cover for the weakness of its field operations as it geared up for its run at the banks. On his return to Chicago in 1992, ACORN’s housing and banking operations were in full force, and Obama was pleased to offer ACORN training, funding, legal representation, advice, and political alliance. So let’s trace the story of ACORN from Obama’s departure for law school in 1988 through 1995, when Obama’s Chicago-based political alliance with ACORN reached maturity, and when ACORN’s extraordinary efforts to transform America’s banking system came to fruition.
The Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) of 1977 called on banks to fulfill their charters by meeting “the convenience and needs” of the communities they served.50 That vague admonition had little effect on the level of subprime lending until the huge increase of mergers in the mid-eighties gave ACORN and other community groups a lever against the banks. ACORN learned that filing a CRA challenge during the critical period after a large acquisition or merger had been assigned a completion date was the key to success. These agreements turned on time-sensitive issues, like the market value of stock, and could be undermined by delay or bad publicity. So even though no CRA challenge during this period actually won on the merits, holding mergers hostage to delay enabled ACORN to force lending concessions from the banks.51
Supposedly, ACORN’s challenges objected to discrimination against minority loan applicants, and targeted banks were ostentatiously accused of outright racism. Yet internal documents make it clear that ACORN’s real enemy was not the discriminatory application of lending standards, but the standards themselves.52 ACORN understood very well that most minority applicants were rejected for lack of a down payment, poor credit histories, or other income-related issues. ACORN’s real goal was the lowering of lending standards, and this is what posed so great a danger to the financial system.
Nonetheless, the basis for CRA challenges remained weak until 1989, when a crisis in the Savings and Loan system and the call for a federal bailout provided ACORN with an ideal opportunity to change the rules. We saw ACORN’s leaders publishing a 1979 article: “ACORN: Taking Advantage of the Fiscal Crisis.” Ten years later, the same theme of using a financial crisis as an opportunity for redistributive reform appears again throughout ACORN’s publications and internal documents.
With an intense national lobbying effort, ACORN managed to mobilize support from allies like the Conference of Mayors, the United Auto Workers, the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights and others to insert three key provisions into the S&L bailout of 1989.53 Federal Home Loan District Banks were required to contribute a portion of their profits to a housing fund that groups like ACORN could tap into. Low-income loan counseling operations (of which ACORN’s was the most prominent) would also get priority access—at below-market prices and below-market financing—to a large share of the homes the government took over from insolvent S&Ls. Finally, changes to the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act required the extensive collection of data by race, creating a raft of opportunities for claims of discrimination under the Community Reinvestment Act.
Unfortunately, these new racial statistics would be used to create the misleading impression of discrimination in instances when not race but credit histories and other financial factors were actually at work. In a last-minute effort to torpedo these legislative changes, Republican senator Phil Gramm of Texas circulated a letter condemning the provisions as a kind of “piracy”. “The special interest housing organizations that would profit from these provisions loudly promote them, but the people who will pay have been told next to nothing.”54 According to Gramm, the ACORN-backed provisions would cost the taxpayer more than $13 billion in property sales that otherwise would have been used to offset the cost of the bailout. President George H. W. Bush came close to vetoing the bailout over the ACORN-backed provisions, yet relented at the last minute when offered concessions on other issues. The original ACORN-supported provisions passed only narrowly in the House—in one case by a margin of only two votes—with special help from Democrats like Joseph Kennedy (D-MA), Barney Frank (D-MA), and Nancy Pelosi (D-CA).55 The House provisions were accepted only reluctantly in conference by the Senate. There is no reason to doubt ACORN’s internal conclusion that without its intense lobbying efforts, these provisions would likely have failed.
Those 1989 legislative changes were a huge boon to ACORN. Housing and banking issues now moved to the very center of its efforts nationally. The new openings for housing agitation also brought help from figures we’ve encountered elsewhere in this book. Peter Dreier and John Atlas, frequent collaborators and leading socialist strategists, now joined hands with both ACORN and the Midwest Academy’s coalition, Citizen Action, to plan a national housing campaign. ACORN’s files from this period include banking strategy memos from Peter Dreier to leaders of ACORN and the Midwest Academy, and memos from Jackie Kendall and Steve Max of the Midwest Academy in reply.56 Behind the scenes, the national campaign to expand subprime lending was being planned and coordinated by leading socialist organizers. Dreier, who helped to popularize the idea of taking advantage of a crisis, drove home the point again in a 1991 memo on continuing housing scandals: “These scandals constitute both a crisis and an opportunity.”57
The provisions ACORN successfully inserted into the 1989 Savings and Loan bailout certainly had a galvanizing effect on its Chicago office.58 Short-staffed with inexperienced organizers when Obama left for law school in 1988, Chicago ACORN had turned the problem around by 1991, when it ended the year with eight well-schooled field organizers.59 The next year, 1992, was a breakthrough, as the new organizers and their expanded campaigns against banks resulted in a major expansion of Chicago ACORN’s loan counseling program. By the end of 1993, ACORN’s Chicago office had added two organizers entirely dedicated to housing protests and two full-time loan counselors.60
Chicago ACORN head Madeline Talbott, who had allied with Obama during his early organizing stint, was the sparkplug of this expansion. Talbott was a specialist in ACORN’s “direct action” protests, and was also a key planner of ACORN’s national banking campaign.61 In February of 1990, only months after the congressional breakthroughs of 1989, Illinois regulators held what was believed to be the first-ever state hearing to consider blocking a thrift merger for lack of compliance with the Community Reinvestment Act. The challenge was filed by Talbott against Bell Federal Savings and Loan Association. Bell complained that ACORN pressure was undermining its ability to make financially responsible loans. Increasingly, Bell maintained, it was being boxed into an “affirmative-action lending policy.”62 The following years saw Talbott featured in dozens of stories about pressuring banks into higher-risk minority loans.
In April 1992, Talbott filed another precedent-setting complaint using the “community support requirements” of the S&L bailout of 1989.63 Within a month, ACORN organized its first “bank fair” at Malcolm X College and found sixteen Chicago-area financial institutions that preferred negotiation with ACORN to disruptive protests.64 Two months later, Talbott announced plans to conduct demonstrations in the lobbies of area banks that refused to attend an ACORN-sponsored national bank “summit” in New York.65 She insisted that banks show a commitment to minority lending by lowering their standards on down payments and underwriting—for example, by overlooking bad credit histories. By September 1992, the Chicago Tribune was describing Talbott’s program as “affirmative-action lending” and ACORN was issuing fact sheets bragging about relaxations of credit standards it had won on behalf of minorities.66
ACORN’s national archives include a 1991 memo from Talbott to all ACORN offices recommending a plan that “makes some cash for us and keeps the lead on this campaign in [ACORN’s] hands.”67 Talbott then explains her bank-fair strategy and lists the many ways partici- pating banks can be induced to financially support ACORN. Chicago’s Talbott was blazing the trail of ACORN’s national grassroots campaign against the banks.
Was ACORN’s housing activism really motivated by socialist-inspired compassion for the poor, or was the huge financial success of ACORN’s banking campaign becoming a motive in and of itself? We don’t necessarily have to choose between these explanations. ACORN’s leaders were ideologically committed to the goals of their group, and no doubt viewed anything that profited ACORN itself as in the best interests of the poor—and of “the cause.” Prospective ACORN “homesteaders” were required to participate in at least five ACORN-sponsored “community events” (read “demonstrations”). “It’s not just about a house” explained one ACORN leader, adding: “What the ACORN Housing Corporation does is indoctrinate you about what being a neighbor is, what being a community is.”68 Although loan applicants counseled by ACORN received titles to their rehabbed homes, ownership of the land beneath their houses remained with ACORN. ACORN leases also limited the ability of homeowners to move out of their properties, or to sell their homes to anyone but ACORN Housing Corporation. As one ACORN leader explained, this policy “helps maintain ACORN’s connection to the product of its labors.”69 Some might see all this as greedy double-dealing on the part of an organization supposedly working for the good of the poor. In the end, however, the proud indoctrination and constraints on private ownership built into ACORN’s housing program were entirely consistent with the group’s underlying socialist ideology.
ACORN’s burgeoning efforts to undermine credit standards in the aftermath of the 1989 changes to the Community Reinvestment and Home Mortgage Disclosure acts taught it a valuable lesson. However much pressure ACORN put on banks to lower credit standards, tough requirements in the “secondary market,” run by quasi-federal housing agencies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, served as a barrier to change. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac buy up mortgages en masse, bundle them, and sell them to investors on the world market. Back then, Fannie and Freddie refused to buy loans that failed to meet high credit standards. If, for example, a local bank buckled to ACORN pressure and agreed to offer poor or minority applicants a 5 percent down-payment rate, instead of the normal 10 to 20 percent, Fannie and Freddie would refuse to buy up those mortgages. That would leave all the risk of these shaky loans with the local bank. So time and again, local banks would tell ACORN that, because of standards imposed by Fannie and Freddie, they could lower credit standards by only a little.70
This substantial barrier to its plans reinforced ACORN’s determination to combine its high-pressure Alinskyite “outside” strategy with a growing “inside” reliance on Washington lobbyists. Somehow ACORN would have to undercut credit standards at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Only then would local banks consider making loans available to customers with bad credit histories, low wages, virtually nothing in the bank, and even bankruptcies on record. It’s evident that ACORN’s initial encounter with Fannie Mae went poorly. A July 12, 1991, internal ACORN “Alert” castigates Fannie Mae for being “totally unwilling to accommodate us.”71 In response, ACORN had its friends in Congress introduce bills compelling Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to support subprime lending and called on its local groups to begin intense lobbying efforts with their own congressional representatives. ACORN’s “Alert” warned that Fannie and Freddie were “on the warpath” against this legislation and called the two agencies “even more formidable opponents than the banking industry.”
ACORN won this showdown, playing a major role in the passage of the “GSE Act” of 1992. House Banking chairman Henry Gonzales “informally deputized” ACORN and other community groups to draft that law’s affordable housing mandates.72 The result was the imposition of low-income loan quotas on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and a loosening of agency underwriting standards to accept down payments of 5 percent or less, and to ignore poor credit histories more than a year old. This is how the Chicago Sun-Times could send readers with bankruptcies and other credit impairments to ACORN for loans.
ACORN had succeeded in dragging Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac—kicking and screaming—into the subprime mortgage business. And ACORN wasn’t done yet. In obedience to its new legislative mandates, Fannie Mae held a bank fair in Chicago in the fall of 1992. Although ACORN wasn’t invited, the group decided to make Fannie an offer it couldn’t refuse. According to Chicago ACORN’s Year-End/Year-Begin Report for 1992–93:
Fannie Mae rolled into town in the fall announcing their bank fair. We went into their planning meeting and reminded them they couldn’t hold a bank fair without us. We got them to give us $25,000 to do turnout. We promised them over 500 and the thought of our people marching into their bankfair helped to bring them around in national negotiations.73
So ACORN’s intimidation tactics not only made the group a tidy twenty-five thousand dollars for turnout efforts that likely cost it little, a message was sent that Fannie Mae’s subprime lending mandates would have to be fulfilled through direct cooperation with ACORN. This move would pay off handsomely for ACORN down the road.
SECTION FOUR
Our narrative has now reached 1992, when Barack Obama’s dealings with Chicago ACORN enter more fully into the light of day. Before exploring new evidence illuminating the ACORN-Obama relationship, it will be useful to review the controversy over the president’s early work with ACORN.
Obama’s ties to ACORN were a hotly debated topic during the 2008 presidential campaign. In early October, Republican presidential nominee John McCain’s campaign ran an Internet ad attacking ACORN for voter registration fraud, intimidation tactics, and pressuring banks to make the same kind of risky loans that caused the financial crisis. McCain’s ad stressed what it called Obama’s “long and deep” ties to the group, including the reported mid-eighties request by Chicago ACORN head Madeline Talbott that Obama train her staff, and a published report that Obama had run training classes for ACORN in the nineties as well.74 Then, in an October 10, 2008, memo, the McCain campaign charged that in 1992, when Obama directed Chicago’s Project Vote, he was effectively running “an arm of ACORN.”75 It should be noted that in May of 2008, at National Review Online, I authored what was quite possibly the first in-depth article spelling out Obama’s ties to ACORN, followed by several other pieces on the topic.76 Directly or indirectly, the McCain Internet ad was likely influenced by that work.
For its part, the Obama campaign energetically denied his ACORN connection, acknowledging only that Obama “represented ACORN in a successful lawsuit” (requiring Illinois to enforce the federal “Motor Voter” law). Obama’s “Fight the Smears” website listed three pertinent “facts”:
Fact: Barack was never an ACORN community organizer.
Fact: Barack was never an ACORN trainer and never worked for ACORN in any other capacity.
Fact: ACORN was not part of Project Vote, the successful voter registration drive Barack ran in 1992.77
When Obama himself was asked by an ABC News reporter on October 14, 2008, to comment on Senator McCain’s charges, he replied:
Well, first of all my relationship with ACORN is pretty straightforward. It’s probably 13 years ago when I was still practicing law, I represented ACORN, and my partner in that investigation was the U.S. Justice Department, in having Illinois implement what was called the Motor Voter law, to make sure people could go to the DMVs and driver’s license facilities to get registered. It wasn’t being implemented. That was my relationship and is my relationship to ACORN. There is an ACORN organization in Chicago. They’ve been active. As an elected official, I’ve had interactions with them. But they’re not advising my campaign. We’ve got the best voter registration in politics right now and we don’t need ACORN’s help. [Emphasis added.]78
Obama reiterated this point on October 15, in the third presidential debate with John McCain, this time making an even more explicit claim that his legal representation of ACORN was his only involvement with that organization:
The only involvement I’ve had with ACORN was I represented them alongside the U.S. Justice Department in making Illinois implement a Motor Voter law that helped people get registered at DMVs. [Emphasis added.]79
Around the same time, two professedly non-partisan fact-check groups took up the issue. Politifact rated McCain’s claim that Project Vote was “an arm of ACORN” when Obama ran it “false.” Politifact then went further and said that it had found no evidence that ACORN and Project Vote “had a relationship” during the 1992 voter registration drive.80 On October 18, 2008, about a week after Politifact’s foray into the issue, Factcheck.org consulted with Sanford Newman, who headed Project Vote nationally in 1992, and who chose Obama to run the group’s operation in Illinois. Newman emphasized that Project Vote didn’t start working exclusively with ACORN until after 1992. Yet Newman conceded that “ACORN may have been one of dozens of organizations that participated in registration drives that year with Project Vote personnel like Obama.”81
Finally, an October 11 New York Times article by Stephanie Strom noted yet more evidence of Obama’s work with ACORN when he ran Project Vote in 1992.82 According to a post by Sam Graham-Felsen, a blogger at Obama’s own website, Obama himself had linked his 1992 work with Project Vote to ACORN. In a meeting at which he sought the presidential endorsement of ACORN’s leaders, Obama reportedly said: “Even before I was an elected official, when I ran Project Vote voter registration drives in Illinois, ACORN was smack dab in the middle of it, and we appreciate your work.”83 (In May of 2009, a controversy erupted over a report that the editors of the New York Times had acted, shortly after the publication of this article, to cut off Strom’s continuing investigations into Obama’s ACORN ties.)84
The next development came well over a year later, in February of 2010, when what appears to be the original video of Obama’s endorsement appeal to ACORN’s leadership finally surfaced. The original video clip has since been withdrawn from the Internet, but its inclusion in a television broadcast yields a transcript of Obama’s private campaign remarks to ACORN:
I definitely welcome ACORN’s input. You don’t have to ask me about that. I’m going to call you even if you didn’t ask me. When I ran Project Vote, the voter registration drive in Illinois, ACORN was smack dab in the middle of it. Once I was elected there wasn’t a campaign that ACORN worked on down in Springfield that I wasn’t right there with you. Since I have been in the United States Senate, I’ve been always a partner with ACORN as well. I’ve been fighting with ACORN, along side ACORN, on the issues you care about my entire career.85
The contrast between Obama’s proud but private affirmation of his longtime relationship with ACORN and his denial of that relationship during the campaign is striking. When we combine already public information with the archival record, Obama’s campaign posture on the ACORN question emerges as a combination of lawyerly evasion and outright falsehood. While it’s true that the McCain campaign went too far in calling Chicago Project Vote an “arm of ACORN” when Obama ran it, nearly everything else the McCain campaign alleged can be confirmed. The fact-checkers, on the other hand, were, at best, less than thorough, since they ignored a good deal of readily available evidence that would have called Obama’s claims into question. At worst, these purportedly neutral fact-checkers may have had a bias that prevented them from finding easily available information bearing directly on the Obama-ACORN controversy. The fact-checkers also relied uncritically on former Obama colleagues, who had every reason to cover for the candidate.
We’ve already seen that Stephanie Strom’s New York Times article, published a week before Factcheck.org’s piece, included an Obama-friendly blogger’s report that Obama himself had bragged to ACORN about his work with them in 1992. Yet Factcheck ignored that report and concluded instead that “Project Vote and ACORN may or may not have worked together in Chicago that year [1992].”86 Yet a March 2007 article in the Washington Post, long pre-dating both fact-checks, provides clear evidence that Obama worked directly with Chicago ACORN leader Madeline Talbott during the 1992 Project Vote campaign:
Fellow community organizer Madeline Talbott said Obama mastered the [Alinsky] approach. She remembers a successful 1992 voter-registration drive that he ran for Project Vote. “He says things like, ‘Do you think we should do this? What role would you like to play?’” said Talbott, chief organizer for Illinois ACORN. “Everybody else just puts out an e-mail and says, ‘Y’all come.’ Barack doesn’t do that.”87
Yet, according to PolitiFact: “We also didn’t find any evidence to indicate the two organizations [Project Vote and ACORN] had a relationship during the 1992 Illinois drive.”88 Apparently, testimony by the leader of Chicago ACORN quoted in the Washington Post, not to mention testimony by Obama himself unearthed by the New York Times a week later (and by me months before) was too difficult to find.89
Keith Kelleher, the head of Chicago’s ACORN-controlled SEIU Local 880, published a history of 880 in the spring of 2008. This was readily available on the Internet and is referred to in the 2010 congressional report on ACORN sponsored by Congressman Darrell Issa (R-CA). In that article, Kelleher explains SEIU 880’s ACORN tie and goes on to say:
Local 880 and Illinois ACORN joined forces with a newly-invigorated voter registration group, Project Vote, run by former community organizer (and current Democratic presidential candidate and U.S. Senator) Barack Obama, to bring other community groups under the Project Vote umbrella and move a large-scale voter registration program for U.S. Senator Carol Moseley Braun.90
Kelleher’s testimony is important for several reasons. Not only was this available evidence of Obama’s direct work with ACORN when the ACORN controversy erupted in the 2008 campaign, it also suggests that the ACORN-SEIU role in Obama’s Project Vote’s coalition was special. According to Kelleher, ACORN and SEIU 880 worked with Obama to bring other community groups into the coalition. In other words, ACORN was at the core of Obama’s coalition, while other groups were on the periphery. Kelleher’s suggestion of a special role for ACORN-SEIU in Obama’s Project Vote coalition is confirmed by archival evidence. Kelleher’s account also contrasts sharply with national Project Vote head Sanford Newman’s 2008 claim that, at best, ACORN may simply have been “one of dozens of organizations” working with Chicago’s Project Vote that year. Notice also that Kelleher lets it slip that ACORN’s work with Project Vote in 1992 was intended to “move a large-scale voter registration program for U.S. Senator Carol Moseley Braun.” As a rule, given legal requirements for tax-exempt voter registration work, Project Vote coalition members are careful to maintain a facade of non-partisanship. So much for evidence bearing on the Project Vote issue that was already public at the time of campaign 2008’s ACORN controversy. Now let’s have a look at what the original documents reveal.
SECTION FIVE
Records of Barack Obama’s work with Illinois Project Vote in 1992 can be found in the files of SEIU Local 880, archived at the Wisconsin Historical Society. Recall that the congressional staff report sponsored by Darrell Issa found that “there was no real separation between ACORN and its affiliates. ACORN is a single corrupt corporate enterprise composed of a series of holding companies and subsidiaries that are financially and operationally dependent upon the main corporation.” The report cited Chicago-based SEIU Local 880 as an example of the substantial intertwining of ACORN and its SEIU affiliates, entailing both financial and political “codependence.”
The records of both Illinois ACORN and SEIU Local 880 confirm this assessment. The two groups shared the same office, and staffers were instructed to answer the phone as either “ACORN” or “Union,” depending on which lines were called.91 More important, both groups reported to ACORN’s chief organizer, Wade Rathke. It’s apparent, moreover, that in the office division of labor, SEIU 880 head Keith Kelleher handled much of the voter registration paperwork for both Chicago ACORN and Local 880.92 So what do the records show?
On June 1, 1992, Illinois Project Vote issued a press release for its public kickoff.93 The release quotes Obama explaining the need for Pro- ject Vote by pointing to the recent rioting in Los Angeles—six days of disturbances that drew the National Guard, the U.S. Army, and finally the United States Marines into the largely African-American neighborhood of South Central Los Angeles. Fifty-three people died, about two thousand were injured, and thirty-six hundred fires were set during these riots, which were sparked by the acquittal of police officers who had beaten an African-American suspect, Rodney King, after he allegedly resisted arrest following a high-speed chase. The riots played out between April 29 and May 4, just four weeks prior to Obama’s press release.94 In that release, Obama concentrated on linking the riots to electoral politics, saying: “The Los Angeles riots reflect a deep distrust and disaffection with the existing power pattern in our society.” To change that power pattern, Obama argued, “people on the bottom of the economic ladder” need to register and vote.
While that June press conference was the public kickoff of Illinois Project Vote’s 1992 campaign, work had gotten under way two months before, when a select group was invited to join the Project Vote steering committee. An April 28 letter invited SEIU Local 880 head Keith Kelleher to be a member of that committee.95 The invitation was on letterhead from the Community Renewal Society, and was signed by Yvonne V. Delk, executive director of that group, by Obama, as Illinois state director of Project Vote, and by Obama’s partner at Project Vote, Joseph Gardner, commissioner of Greater Chicago’s Water Reclamation District. This letter presented registration of poor and minority voters as a way to shift the strategies of both political parties: “Both the Republicans and the Democrats have focused their attention on ‘courting the so called middle class,’ because low income and minority persons are not expected to register and vote. We feel that it is time that political leadership recognized the needs and interest of all citizens.”
Obama’s co-signatories on that letter, Yvonne Delk and Joe Gardner, were part and parcel of the hard-left network we’ve been exploring throughout this book. In Chapter Three I told the story of the Black Theology Project (BTP), followers of black liberation theologian James Cone, a group of whom traveled to Cuba to enthusiastically support Castro’s revolution. Jeremiah Wright sat on the board of that group and twice went to Cuba with BTP. Yvonne Delk sat on the BTP board with Wright and helped to organize BTP’s Chicago chapter, which met at Wright’s church beginning in late 1986, not long before Obama himself first met Wright.96 Obama may have used his Wright connection to get Delk’s Community Renewal Society to provide facilities for Project Vote. Obama may even have met Delk at Black Theology Project meetings in the mid-eighties. Obama’s work with Delk at Project Vote shows a significant link to Wright’s radical network.
Joe Gardner served as director of field operations for Harold Washington’s historic 1983 campaign for mayor of Chicago, and in the wake of Washington’s death, Gardner emerged as a rising political star in Chicago.97 A longtime official of Reverend Jesse Jackson’s Operation PUSH, Gardner had been Jackson’s chief negotiator in the development of economic “covenants” with American corporations.98 If many viewed this as a valuable service to minorities, others saw Jackson’s high-pressure campaigns against allegedly biased corporations as an only slightly less egregious form of de facto extortion than that practiced by ACORN. A Chicago community organizer named Mark S. Allen reports that, on Gardner’s recommendation, he (Allen) worked with Obama in the mid-eighties. According to Allen, Obama regularly attended Saturday morning Operation PUSH registration forums run by Gardner in 1986.99
Gardner had also been a community organizer for Saul Alinsky’s Chicago group, the Woodlawn Organization, in the 1970s.100 Gardner may have met Heather Booth back then, when she was training with Alinsky and working with his Chicago-wide alliance, CAP. In any case, Gardner was a close ally of Booth, who helped lead Gardner’s metropolitan sanitary district commissioner election drive in Chicago’s Lakefront district.101 Finally, Gardner was on the board of Human SERVE, the voter registration group run by Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven.102 Marxist theorists Cloward and Piven had a longstanding relationship with ACORN and its predecessor group, the National Welfare Rights Organization. In their later work, Cloward and Piven hit on the idea of provoking polarizing battles around voter registration as the key to a socialist transformation of the United States. Their ultimate goal was to drive the Democratic Party to the left, thus dividing the country along class lines. These ideas were discussed at the Cooper Union Socialist Scholars Conference where Obama discovered his vocation as a community organizer.
Clearly, a peek into almost any element of Obama’s political network tends to uncover connections to almost every other piece of the puzzle. The socialist thinkers, community organizers, and radical theologians Obama relied on were all politically allied. The cross-connections are multiple and variable. The broadly socialist political orientation remains constant.
A list of the twenty-two-member steering committee of Project Vote’s “Chicago Coalition” provides yet another glimpse of Obama’s political network.103 Both Chicago ACORN’s Madeline Talbott and SEIU Local 880’s Keith Kelleher were on Obama’s Project Vote steering committee. This, of course, is consistent with the accounts we’ve already seen from both Talbott and Kelleher of their work with Obama in 1992. It also shows that ACORN and SEIU 880 stood at the center of Obama’s Project Vote coalition, bringing other groups into the fold, yet enjoying a special standing.
Kim Bobo, a leader in the nineties of the powerful socialist front group the Midwest Academy, was also on Obama’s steering committee, along with Reverend Jeremiah Wright, Father Michael Pfleger, and Obama’s successor at the Developing Communities Project, John Owens. Sokoni Karanja, an influential member of Wright’s congregation and a close Obama associate, was on the steering committee as well. An August 1992 Chicago Sun-Times piece about Project Vote highlights training sessions taking place in the basement of Wright’s Trinity United Church of Christ.104 Clearly, then, Obama’s interest in Reverend Wright extended beyond strictly spiritual matters.
Despite Project Vote’s officially non-partisan status, it was very much a part of the successful effort to elect Carol Moseley Braun to the U.S. Senate in 1992. In a sense, Obama was allied with Heather Booth in this effort, since Booth—arguably the queen of socialist politics in Chicago—served as field director for Moseley Braun’s campaign.105 Technically, Booth was no longer director of the Midwest Academy, yet she surely continued to enjoy tremendous de facto power there. Kelleher’s papers include records of his contacts with Heather Booth.106 Kelleher wanted Booth to arrange for Moseley Braun to appear at a “multi-purpose” ACORN event at which voters would be registered, but where the focus would be on ACORN’s banking campaign and Moseley Braun’s political pitch. If there was any separation at all between Project Vote’s supposedly non-partisan efforts, the Moseley Braun campaign, and ACORN’s banking activism, it is impossible to discern it from Kelleher’s writings. In 1992, Obama, ACORN, the Moseley Braun campaign, Reverend Wright, Father Pfleger, and the Midwest Academy were all part of a single tightly interconnected political alliance. This is entirely consistent with ACORN’s own conception of its voter registration work. Internal ACORN documents stress that its voter registration activities should never be conducted in isolation, but always be tightly bound to ACORN’s recruiting efforts and issue campaigns.107 That is one reason why Obama’s voter regis- tration work with ACORN matters. Obama’s decision to place Chi- cago ACORN and SEIU Local 880 on Project Vote’s original steering committee advanced ACORN as an organization. ACORN’s leaders were very clearly part of a select group of Obama’s closest political associates.
ACORN’s banking campaign was running full speed throughout the Moseley Braun campaign. In September of 1992, ACORN’s banking activism and Chicago ACORN’s work for Carol Moseley Braun would dramatically intersect. The tale begins with ACORN’s campaign against Citibank, one of the few major national financial institutions that refused to join ACORN’s loan program. Citibank left a July 1992 ACORN-sponsored bank “summit” without agreeing to cooperate. Within days, five hundred singing and chanting ACORN members “stormed” Citicorp’s New York headquarters, in what one ACORN official called “an old-fashioned takeover.”108 At that point, Citibank agreed to talk, but without committing to cooperation beyond that.
The storming of Citicorp kicked off a carefully coordinated national effort to crush remaining resistance from America’s banks to “voluntary” cooperation with ACORN’s subprime mortgage programs. A July 18, 1992, strategy memo from ACORN head Wade Rathke begins, “Clearly we are riding a bronco here.”109 Rathke assigned Steuart Pittman to coordinate the national banking effort. (This is apparently the same ACORN operative who organized tenants at Chicago’s Altgeld Gardens housing project in 1984, just before Obama’s arrival.) Chicago ACORN’s Madeline Talbott was to serve as the campaign’s national “field director,” whipping up “mass actions” against carefully targeted banks across the country.110 One thing ACORN and the banks agreed on was the resemblance between ACORN’s banking campaign and an extortion racket. Rathke ends his July 18 memo with a reference to “all of our joking about extortion of the banks.” A follow-up memo from one of ACORN’s legislative lobbyist notes that many of the banks at ACORN’s summit “clearly viewed us as an extortion ring.”111
The foundation had now been laid for a dramatic confrontation between Chicago ACORN and Citibank. This clash left ACORN’s banking campaign coordinators buzzing for weeks. Chicago Citibank staffers had been summoned to an August 29 ACORN rally and were seated on a stage looking out on four hundred ACORN and Local 880 members as ACORN banking expert Ernestine Whiting berated them unmercifully before the crowd—presumably for racism and greed. Whiting was about to temper her attacks with at least a bit of praise when U.S. Senate candidate Carol Moseley Braun showed up to address the crowd. This left the Citibank people “shaking with anger” and “embarrassed and stewing on stage.” Said one memo, “By the end of the rally the negotiations were irretrievable. The Citibank representatives took everything personal. They felt they had been set up for a ‘good old fashioned blind-sided sucker punch.’” The “meeting ended with a 10 minute shouting match,” after which the female Citibank CRA officer was literally pulled out of the room by a male colleague as she was getting ready to physically attack one of ACORN’s female leaders.112 Apparently, the Carol Moseley Braun appearance that Keith Kelleher had arranged with Heather Booth, in conjunction with Project Vote, set off one of ACORN’s more notorious banking clashes. The records do not show how much Obama knew about this, but it was the talk of his ACORN colleagues for weeks. In any case, as a civil rights attorney filing housing discrimination suits in Chicago, Obama surely knew about ACORN’s high-pressure attack on area banks. Obama was co-counsel in a 1994 suit against Citibank for alleged racial discrimination in its mortgage policies.113 Obama might have coordinated that suit with ACORN. In any case, it’s clear that, despite his denials in 2008, Obama’s 1992 Project Vote alliance was deeply entangled in ACORN’s broader organizing work.
It took a while for ACORN to bring Citicorp to heel, but the bankers were afraid to walk away from the table, so ACORN ultimately got its way. Meanwhile, in late 1992, two ominous events transpired behind the scenes. On October 20, 1992, prominent socialist strategists and ACORN allies Peter Dreier and John Atlas sat down with a high ACORN official and Marc Weiss, presidential candidate Bill Clinton’s senior policy advisor on housing.114 Weiss emphasized his desire to reverse President Reagan’s elimination of politicized VISTA grants. Weiss argued, however, that reversing Reagan’s “de-funding of the left” would better be done by “hiding” financial support for ACORN inside nondescript government programs than by an open battle to revive a controversial program like VISTA. ACORN agreed with this tactic of stealth. ACORN also endorsed a big-picture Atlas-Dreier housing strategy paper for the new administration. In a second ominous development, Congresswoman Maxine Waters (D-CA) invited a top ACORN lobbyist to write a piece of legislation designed to grant ACORN everything it wanted from federal housing policy.115
SECTION SIX
In November of 1992, Carol Moseley Braun won her Senate seat and Bill Clinton won the presidency. Obama moved on from Project Vote to a civil rights law practice in Chicago. Meanwhile, Chicago ACORN’s banking campaign pressed on. Thanks in great part to ACORN’s lobbying, Congress imposed low-income lending quotas on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in 1992, while Chicago ACORN’s threat to invade Fannie Mae’s bank fair helped force the agency to cooperate with ACORN’s loan-counseling corporation nationally. The result was a 1993 Fannie Mae pilot program led by Chicago ACORN’s Madeline Talbott. According to the Chicago Sun-Times, this partnership of ACORN and Fannie Mae was designed to make mortgages available to borrowers “with troubled credit histories.”116 In time, this initiative would provoke a brand-new form of financial trouble for the nation.
Meanwhile, in the nation’s capital, ACORN was ushered through the doors of power. National ACORN’s files from 1993 are filled with records of visits to high officials of the Clinton administration, including White House chief of staff Mack McLarty, Clinton confidant and associate attorney general Webster Hubbell, and officials of the president’s Domestic Policy Council and National Economic Council.117 The Senate Banking Committee even asked for advice on “ACORN-type pork” (the committee’s phrase, not ACORN’s) to include in a banking bill.118 ACORN’s agenda at this point reached far beyond the Community Reinvestment Act, although ACORN did want to see CRA “strengthened.” ACORN’s real goal going into the Clinton administration was to spread the lending provisions of the Community Reinvestment Act throughout the financial system as a whole. This had already begun with the imposition of low-income lending quotas on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and ACORN was determined to push the process further.
The most ACORN-friendly Clinton administration official of all was Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Henry Cisneros. A delegation of top ACORN leaders and lobbyists left their first meeting with Cisneros “elated.”119 Famous as one of the first Hispanic mayors of an American city, Cisneros had established a working relationship in his home of San Antonio with a largely Hispanic community group called COPS (Communities Organized for Public Service). COPS’s ground-breaking political pressure techniques were developed by Ernesto Cortez, an organizer for the IAF (Industrial Areas Foundation), the organizing institute founded by Saul Alinsky himself.120 COPS was the model Obama mentors Greg Galluzzo and Mary Gonzales had in mind when they founded their own largely Hispanic community group, UNO of Chicago, in 1980.121
So when ACORN met with Housing Secretary Cisneros, it found a friend. The first of many meetings between ACORN and Cisneros lasted for two uninterrupted hours, instead of the one hour originally scheduled. Already, at that first meeting, Cisneros promised ACORN help with what were soon to become the Clinton administration’s signature changes in low-income lending policy—at Fannie and Freddie and elsewhere. Cisneros then asked ACORN’s leaders for detailed information on their organizing techniques, which he wanted to compare to tactics used by COPS. He asked if ACORN was “adversarial,” forcing politicians into yes-or-no answers like COPS (and like UNO of Chicago—and Obama himself). Cisneros made his approval of these tough tactics clear. Without being asked, Cisneros also requested ideas on ways HUD could channel money to ACORN and other community organizations. This last topic is what added an hour onto the meeting.
Their first encounter with Cisneros set ACORN’s top leadership buzzing. Although they were elated, ACORN’s officials worried that government money would turn them into a political target.122 Memories of the old VISTA scandals and similar controversies lingered. Just days after that first meeting with Cisneros, ACORN head Wade Rathke issued a long memo (with copies to Madeline, Zach, and Steuart, among others, presumably Madeline Talbott, Zach Polett, and Steuart Pittman). The memo was a masterpiece in the art of hiding money trails—penned by the master himself. Rathke wraps up his tour of possible schemes for camouflaging federal dollars by saying:
I think pragmatically the politics are such that we would be wise to resist grants and/or contracts directly to ACORN, Inc. but try and either set up separate corporations … or use existing corporations … that are less overtly moving the money di- rectly into ACORN, Inc., though in truth it would be going there in other ways. Certainly having CORAP [an older and controversial ACORN stand-in entity] did not completely insulate us from problems, but I can not believe it is smart for him [Cisneros] or for us to leave our ass hanging in the wind waiting to be kicked.123
Specific legal accusations aside, this certainly seems consistent with the general picture of ACORN’s financial shell games sketched out by Congressman Issa and other ACORN critics.
ACORN didn’t quite have carte blanche within the Clinton administration, which had its pro-business elements as well. Occasionally ACORN had to battle administration opponents, at which times ACORN seemed particularly good at getting its hands on memos it was not supposed to see (no doubt through leaks from allies in the bureaucracy).124 On one occasion, ACORN led a successful behind-the-scenes charge to torpedo the nomination of a banking regulator who was hostile to their approach.125 ACORN had clout.
ACORN also seems to have played a significant behind-the-scenes role in Assistant Secretary for Fair Housing Roberta Achtenberg’s efforts to push subprime lending through the broader financial system. By the mid-nineties, the Community Reinvestment Act applied only to about a quarter of the banking system. Yet Achtenberg made key regulatory changes that had the effect of pressuring the other three-quarters of America’s mortgage industry into greater subprime lending.126 In particular, Achtenberg ruled that, regardless of any intention to discriminate, policies that ended up granting proportionally more loans to some groups than others would be considered discriminatory. So if blacks in some cities happened to have shakier credit histories than whites (a common phenomenon), banks would be punished even for applying exactly the same lending standards to both blacks and whites. Achtenberg’s new definition of discrimination helped push even institutions not covered by CRA into the business of shaky subprime lending. ACORN pressed Achtenberg hard on this and other issues, at times with help from Housing Secretary Cisneros.127 So when ACORN denies responsibility for the financial meltdown by pointing to the limited jurisdiction of the Community Reinvestment Act, it is being disingenuous. ACORN used its considerable influence within the Clinton administration to spread the practice of subprime lending well beyond those sections of the banking system controlled by CRA.
On April 20, 1993, having heard a presentation from ex-Weatherman Bill Ayers, then an education expert at the University of Illinois, three hundred ACORN members began shouting and chanting “Small Schools Now! Small Schools Now!” pressing local officials to sign on to Ayer’s project.128 Ayers had become a consultant to Chicago ACORN on his signature issue: creating miniature “schools-within-schools” built around themes, such as peace and Afro-centrism. The catch phrase “small schools” was really a euphemism for what would more accurately have been called, “leftist political schools.”
Working with Ayers, ACORN’s plan was to set up a series of ACORN-controlled mini-schools in Chicago. Although banking was ACORN’s top priority in the early to mid-nineties, education was a major ACORN initiative during these years. After linking up with Bill Ayers to run a foundation called the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, Obama himself would soon be deeply involved in ACORN’s education efforts. I’ll leave further discussion of ACORN’s education program to the chapter on Obama’s relationship to Bill Ayers. It’s important to keep in mind, however, that alongside Chicago ACORN’s preoccupation with its mortgage campaign, the group’s educational partnership with Bill Ayers was getting off the ground in 1993.
SECTION SEVEN
Along with ACORN’s move to gain a foothold within the public school system by creating its own mini-schools, the group’s other major priority in 1993—after housing—was the creation of a third political party under de facto ACORN control. Along with a considerable number of prominent American socialists, ACORN was a key force behind the formation of the “New Party.” Obama first ran for office with New Party endorsement, and while Obama and his supporters vehemently deny it, substantial evidence indicates that Obama himself was a member of the New Party. The New Party was far to the left of the mainstream Democratic Party, although its “fusion” strategy allowed it to endorse candidates running on the Democratic line. Like the Citizen/Labor Energy Coalition, the New Party is best understood as an attempt to build a mass-based political front for a largely socialist party leadership.
Obama’s tie to this far-left, ACORN-controlled third party explains a lot about why he denied his ACORN connection during the 2008 campaign. Although Obama’s selection of ACORN and SEIU Local 880 to be on Project Vote’s steering committee in 1992 was a real boon to those groups, it’s hard to see why Obama didn’t just confess his 1992 alliance with Chicago ACORN. That connection could likely have been acknowledged and minimized without serious political damage. The deeper problem for Obama was that his ACORN connection went well beyond Project Vote and included membership in an ACORN-controlled third political party, far to the left of the American mainstream. Public awareness of that third-party connection could have done serious harm to the Obama campaign in 2008. So it was apparently worth deceiving the public to keep the full picture of Obama’s involvement with ACORN out of sight.
To this day, few Americans know anything about the controversy over Obama’s ties to the New Party. Along with other critics, I wrote about Obama’s New Party connection during the 2008 campaign, yet the mainstream press avoided the issue.129 This is another reason why popular perceptions of Obama’s politics continue to differ so greatly. American conservatives who read online sources tend to know things about Obama’s radical political past that the broader public has never heard.
After I wrote about Obama’s New Party ties, late in the 2008 campaign, Obama’s “Fight the Smears” website came out swinging—calling my claim that Obama had been a New Party member a “crackpot smear.”130 As Obama’s critics buzzed about the New Party issue, Politico’s Ben Smith—a prominent media gatekeeper—poured cold water on the idea that there was anything particularly radical about the New Party, or that Obama himself had been a member. Smith’s source for these denials was New Party co-founder Joel Rogers. Smith and I then had several sharp exchanges about Obama’s New Party ties.131
Through the medium of Ben Smith, New Party co-founder Joel Rogers first moved to quash concerns about Obama’s New Party connection by denying that the New Party ever had members at all.132 If nobody was a New Party member, of course, Obama could hardly have been one. Rogers also stressed to Smith that the New Party’s contemporary successor, New York State’s Working Families Party, had endorsed Hillary Clinton—and even some Republican State Senate candidates. Rogers then described the New Party platform for Smith as favoring “national health insurance and wage insurance, quality education, and environmentalism,” all ideologically “well within the left half of the Democratic Party,” Smith concluded. As for the charge that the New Party was socialist, Rogers said that socialism meant placing the “means of production under public ownership.” “The New Party was never about that,” Rogers maintained.
Rogers’s claims about the New Party were thoroughly misleading. The New Party certainly did have members. In fact, the New Party’s own publications called Obama a member. It’s tough to see how taking contemporaneous New Party documents at their word constitutes a “crackpot smear.” It’s true that the New Party’s successor, the Working Families Party, endorsed Hillary Clinton and the occasional Republican, but its fusion strategy is designed to use co-endorsements to pull the rest of the political spectrum to the left. One of the reasons liberal New York Republican state senator Deirdre (Dede) Scozzafava raised a national furor among Republicans when she ran for Congress in 2009 is that she had repeatedly been endorsed by the Working Families Party. Republicans across the country were outraged that Scozzafava had run with support from this far-left, ACORN-controlled group.133 Moreover, Joel Rogers understood perfectly well that in the eighties and nineties America’s socialists had shifted their strategy away from (immediate) nationalization of the means of production. After all, Rogers himself was one of the most important advocates of taking control of the economy indirectly, “from below,” by gaining a place for groups like ACORN in the boardrooms and financial centers of capitalism.134
The New Party’s platform was also far more radical than platitudes like “quality education” and “environmentalism” indicate. So Rogers’s self-interested denials of New Party radicalism—and of Obama’s own New Party membership—were deeply misleading. This was already clear from information in the public domain, but I have new evidence from the ACORN archives at the Wisconsin Historical Society that allows us to follow Obama’s path to membership in the New Party in greater detail.
Before examining the archival material pertaining to Obama’s own New Party ties, let’s review the evidence for the New Party’s radicalism—and its links to ACORN. The files of Illinois ACORN/SEIU 880 at the Wisconsin Historical Society reveal internal debate about how ideologically open the New Party ought to be. In an early strategy memo, New Party co-founders Daniel Cantor and Joel Rogers called on the party to publicly advocate “social democracy.” Cantor and Rogers wanted the New Party to be “an explicitly social democratic organization, with an ideology roughly like that of Northern European (e.g., Swedish) labor movements.”135 A party standing on the left side of Sweden’s political spectrum would clearly be radical by American standards—and a far cry from Rogers’s portrayal of the New Party’s stance to Ben Smith. That’s exactly why one New Party figure took issue with Cantor/Rogers and called instead for the New Party to use “less ideologically charged” public language—even as that critic confessed personal agreement with Cantor’s and Rogers’s far-left political preferences.136
Other internal ACORN/New Party documents articulate the modified socialist strategy of the day, calling for a “pragmatic” leftism that rejects ideological purity and instead favors “organizing the private economy to serve public ends.”137 In other words, instead of nationalization, the New Party hoped to use a combination of government regulation and devolution of power to community groups like ACORN to create “popular and democratic control over the economy.”138 The agenda here was simply socialism by other means. A sympathetic article on the New Party in the newsletter of the Democratic Socialists of America got the message—treating the New Party’s political goals as a kind of stand-in for socialism.139
The New Party’s nineties platform was actually an updated version of the superficially “populist”—but de facto socialist—program favored by Obama’s future mentors and colleagues at the Midwest Academy in the late seventies and early eighties.140 Echoing Midwest Academy strategy, the New Party downplayed controversial social issues like abortion, gay rights, and affirmative action, instead using economic campaigns to build a national majority coalition along class lines.141 There is certainly overlap between the New Party platform and the liberal agenda of today’s Democratic Party—including “card check” unionization laws and early advocacy for what we now call “cap-and-trade” pollution taxes.
Yet the New Party also envisioned a program of constraints on America’s businesses that was far to the left of the Democratic Party. Announcing that “our major economic problem is not the government, as conservatives claim, but American enterprise itself,” the New Party called for a “demanding Federal code of social responsibility” that would subject all private companies to “standards of social usefulness.” Businesses abiding by this code would be “eligible for ‘most favored company’ status, with attendant benefits.” The New Party also called for a “Corporate Democracy Act” much like the one backed by the Midwest Academy and its anti-business coalition partners back in 1980.142 So the New Party was a reincarnation in the nineties of the stealth-socialist electoral and legislative politics practiced by the Midwest Academy more than a decade before. This time, however, Obama was right in the middle of it.
Joel Rogers’s denials to Ben Smith notwithstanding, then, the New Party’s program was an effectively socialist grab for public control over the economy. The strategy was to leave the private economy formally intact, while turning it into a hollow shell in practice. Leftist observers said as much, acknowledging, with a wink, the New Party’s reluctance to be labeled socialist, while pointing out that its actual policies would be considered “radical” even by European standards.143 Joel Rogers himself touted the New Party in the Marxist journal New Left Review, in terms that made his party’s underlying socialism clear.144
The New Party was chock full of prominent American socialists. The papers of Frances Fox Piven contain letters from New Party co-founder Danny Cantor inviting the large delegation of New Party members speaking at the 1993 Socialist Scholars Conference to a socialist workshop on the New Party, with a large group photo afterward.145 Many of these individuals—Frances Fox Piven, Manning Mar- able, Barbara Ehrenreich, Cornel West—had been prominent at the Socialist Scholars Conferences Obama attended in the mid-eighties (see Chapter Two). Recall that New Party co-founder Danny Cantor himself had been enamored of Marxist theorist Andre Gorz back when he worked for ACORN in 1979.
During the 2008 presidential campaign, I bracketed the question of the New Party’s alleged socialism.146 The issue struck me as fraught with definitional complications, and ultimately unnecessary to settle, given the fact that the New Party was far to the left of the Democratic Party. Having been forced by my study of Obama’s past to confront the socialism question, I am now convinced that it is fair, revealing, and important to label the New Party an effectively socialist group. In 2008, I made note of the fact that about a quarter of New Party members in Chicago came from the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). Yet I also emphasized that the vast majority of Chicago New Party members were associated with Chicago ACORN or SEIU Local 880, rather than the DSA.147 It’s now clear, however, that ACORN itself is a socialist front group. So the New Party was a coalition of open socialists from the DSA and a larger, “mass-based” socialist front group called ACORN. These sorts of partially stealthy hard-left coalitions are what enabled sophisticated American socialists in the post-sixties era to exercise large-scale political power.
The New Party was also very much a front for ACORN—and this was particularly so in Chicago. According to the most informative published history of the New Party: “Wade Rathke, ACORN’s lead national organizer, was in on the founding discussions that led to the New Party, and the group’s political director, Zach Polett, also came to play a big role in guiding New Party field organizing for the party [in Chicago and Little Rock].”148 Illinois ACORN/SEIU Local 880 documents confirm this. Madeline Talbott and Keith Kelleher were clearly running the New Party on the ground in Chicago, while coordinating their moves with Zach Polett at ACORN central in Little Rock.149 The national newsletter of the Democratic Socialists of America also treats the New Party as essentially the “electoral arm” of ACORN and its allied SEIU locals.150
A fascinating July 1993 exchange between Zach and Wade (presumably ACORN political director Zach Polett and ACORN head Wade Rathke) specifies ACORN’s ultimate interest in the New Party.151 In these memos from the ACORN archive, Polett notes resistance by many potential recruits to joining a third political party. Polett asks Rathke if it might be a better idea to drop the formal party plan and instead explore a technically non-party vehicle like that being used by the Ross Perot movement at the time. Rathke replies that while he hopes for the national success of the New Party, his real long-term goal for ACORN is the creation of a true third party with its own ballot line in cities where ACORN is strong. In short, the New Party in Chicago was essentially an electoral front for ACORN. Of course, the New Party had not yet achieved its own separate ballot line in Chicago in 1996. So when Obama first stood for public office he ran on the Democratic line. Yet by enthusiastically accepting the endorsement of the New Party—and the party membership that acceptance entailed—Obama was cementing his relationship with ACORN, and, in effect, sending out a message that he would be ACORN’s man in the Illinois State Senate.
Illinois New Party documents are filled with references to individuals we know are part of Obama’s political network, and some other interesting characters as well. It’s not always clear whether Obama’s close political associates had actually joined the New Party, but many of them were on lists of recruiting prospects. Jeremiah Wright was apparently suggested as a possible New Party recruit by Joe Gardner, Obama’s partner at Project Vote.152 Gardner himself cooperated extensively with both the New Party and the party’s front group, “Progressive Chicago.”153 John (“Jody”) Kretzmann, a longtime associate of both Barack and Michelle Obama, was on the New Party mailing list, along with Obama’s successor at the Developing Communities Project, John Owens.154 There was also a New Party contingent from the Committee of Correspondence—an even more hard-line Marxist organization than the Democratic Socialists of America.155 This included prominent former SDSer Carl Davidson, who was singled out for a special invitation from Talbott and Kelleher to join the New Party’s leadership.156 Longtime Obama colleague and prominent Chicago socialist Quentin Young also hosted an early New Party fundraiser.157
As leaders of both the New Party and Chicago ACORN, Madeline Talbott and Keith Kelleher had several reasons to pursue Obama in 1993. Talbott was copied on a March 1993 memo from Zach Polett reporting on a meeting with Marxist theorists, longtime ACORN supporters, and voter registration activists Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven. Cloward and Piven foresaw the need to build up a stable of civil rights lawyers around the country to bring suits to force compliance with the Motor Voter Act.158 No doubt Talbott quickly realized that Obama was a candidate for the job in Illinois, which in fact he got two years later, in 1995. In 1993, the Illinois New Party also badly needed a competent lawyer to provide it with pro bono (free) legal assistance.159 On top of that, as a well-connected Chicago leftist who had worked closely with ACORN in 1992 and was famous as the first black editor of the Harvard Law Review, Obama surely stood out as a possible future New Party electoral candidate. What plays out in New Party/ACORN/SEIU 880 files in 1993, then, is a systematic campaign to woo Obama into a deeper relationship with Chicago ACORN and its electoral arm, the New Party.
In 1993, Keith Kelleher initiated a series of meetings with prominent Chicago leftists he viewed as potential future members of the New Party. To facilitate the recruitment process, the New Party/ACORN/SEIU 880 created a front group called “Progressive Chicago.” Supposedly the purpose of Progressive Chicago was to reunite the coalition that had elected Harold Washington mayor.160 In fact, Progressive Chicago was designed as a buffer that would allow individuals and groups that might be uncomfortable working directly with a third party to provide the New Party with indirect support.161 In other words, work with Progressive Chicago would allow politically connected leftists to help the New Party, without angering their Democratic Party allies. Ultimately, of course, Progressive Chicago was designed to serve as a recruitment funnel into the New Party. Kelleher’s private meetings with prominent Chicago leftists throughout 1993 were intended to scout out potential New Party recruits, whom he would at first simply try to draw into a public association with Progressive Chicago.
In May of 1993, Kelleher met with former top Harold Washington political aide Jacky Grimshaw.162 We learned in Chapter Five that Grimshaw was a close colleague of Heather Booth and a strong supporter of Booth’s socialist front group, the Midwest Academy. Grimshaw was also a close colleague of Barack and Michelle Obama at Public Allies and is currently the next-door neighbor of the Obamas in Chicago. Grimshaw’s recommendation to Sanford Newman at Project Vote, along with support from other Chicago organizers, helped Obama secure his position at the head of Illinois Project Vote in 1992.163 Kelleher’s hand notes from his meeting with Grimshaw show her recommending Obama as a possible New Party recruit, along with Midwest Academy leader Jackie Kendall and Obama’s early organizing mentor at UNO of Chicago, Mary Gonzales. Meanwhile, New Party files in June of 1993 contain indications that obtaining free legal advice for the New Party was becoming an increasingly urgent priority. This gave Kelleher yet another reason to court Obama.
On July 27, 1993, Keith Kelleher personally met with Obama about a possible association with Progressive Chicago—and ultimately the New Party.164 Kelleher’s hand notes from that meeting show that, like so many other potential New Party recruits, Obama was interested, yet also cautious about anything that might jeopardize his relations with the Democratic Party. Supposedly, the New Party’s “fusion” strategy was designed to solve this problem, by allowing New Party candidates to cooperate with other parties as well. Yet fusion or not, prospective New Party members were understandably cautious about offending the Democrats by joining a third party.
According to Kelleher’s hand notes, Obama told him that he was “more than happy to be involved” in New Party/Progressive Chicago affairs. On the other hand, Obama said he would be cautious about anything that might offend regular Democrats, and emphasized that he had no desire to “force people” into the New Party. Obama was clearly cagey and cautious, apparently telling Kelleher that he could attend a meeting (presumably of Progressive Chicago, but perhaps also of the New Party itself), yet couldn’t “put too much time into it.” Among others, Obama listed Alice Palmer (three years before he succeeded her in the Illinois State Senate) and Danny Davis (who eventually ran for Congress with the New Party) as potential New Party candidate recruits.
About two weeks later, New Party co-founder Daniel Cantor sent Obama a letter copied to Kelleher, to the other New Party co-founder, Joel Rogers, and to Rogers’s wife, Sarah Siskind. Siskind was a lawyer in the Madison, Wisconsin, office of Obama’s law firm and herself did important legal work defending the New Party’s ability to run “fusion” candidates on state ballots. Siskind sometimes reported on her legal progress to ACORN head Wade Rathke.165 In his letter to Obama, Cantor says that, based on what Sarah Siskind has already said to him about Obama, he (Cantor) expects that Obama ought to be quite interested in the New Party. Cantor encloses a batch of New Party literature and invites Obama to have a “serious discussion” with party theorist Joel Rogers about the New Party’s purpose and strategy, on one of Rogers’s frequent trips to Chicago.166
A couple of months later, in a September 30, 1993, report on New Party activities to Danny Cantor, Keith Kelleher returns to the difficult issue of finding an affordable lawyer for the party. Kelleher notes that Sarah Siskind was planning to speak with “Barack” about doing legal work for the New Party, “but I have had no response from either of them” for a month. Kelleher then calls the task of finding a New Party lawyer a “major problem,” noting that other potential candidates had been scared off for fear of offending the Democrats.167
A month later, on November 2, 1993, a memo from Keith Kelleher to Madeline Talbott appears to indicate that Kelleher has finally heard back from Obama. Kelleher has located a couple of attorneys willing to do legal work for the Illinois New Party. The problem is that none of these lawyers will work for free. Kelleher appears to think that Obama might help to lighten the cost of choosing one of these prospective attorneys, Steve Saltsman:
He [Saltsman] said that we would control what his price will be by the stuff we ask him to do. He also said he could meet within the next week with us and/or the candidate. I did not ask Saltsman if he could work with Barack or have Barack do a lot of the work but Saltsman was open to teaching our members and staff to do a lot of the legal legwork, so he may not have a problem working with Barack.168
While Keith’s (presumably Keith Kelleher’s) meaning here cannot be known with certainty, the most reasonable interpretation, I think, is that Obama has let Kelleher know that he is—or may be—willing to do pro bono legal work for the New Party, so long as it does not involve openly taking on the role of the New Party’s attorney in Illinois. Kelleher clearly seems to think that the New Party would be able to save money on legal fees if Saltsman were to farm out some of his work to Obama. So it seems likely that Obama finally did get back to Kelleher and express a willingness to do at least some pro bono work for the party on a quiet basis.
If it’s true that Obama gave at least a qualified indication of willingness to do legal work for the New Party, it also seems likely that Obama would have taken advantage of the opportunity to meet with Joel Rogers about the party’s broader aspirations. Keep in mind that Obama did enthusiastically accept the New Party’s endorsement in his first run for office in 1995–96. Given that, Obama’s active consultation and cooperation with the party’s leaders in 1993 seems all the more likely. Documents indicate that Steve Saltsman did eventually do legal work for the New Party.169 It’s unclear how long Saltsman’s work continued, or whether Obama was ever involved. At a minimum, however, Obama seems to have given Kelleher reason to expect cooperation on a pro bono, or at least low-cost basis.
On the last day of 1993, a formal letter on Progressive Chicago letterhead inviting Obama to attend a meeting of the group went out under the signatures of Joe Gardner, Obama’s partner at Project Vote the year before, and Ron Sable.170 Sable was a prominent Chicago activist, a member of the socialist New American Movement (NAM), and a leading member of the Chicago chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America. Sable was also a board member of the Illinois Public Action Council (IPAC), the socialist-controlled community group most closely associated with Chicago’s Midwest Academy.
The bulk of records from Chicago ACORN and SEIU Local 880 at the Wisconsin Historical Society extend through 1993. These records, however, do include a small archive box with just a few files from 1994. Inside that box is a remarkable packet of material—four attached memos from June of 1994—that cast substantial new light on Barack Obama’s dealings with ACORN.171 We saw that in the third presidential debate of 2008, Obama claimed that the only involvement he’d had with ACORN was his role as the group’s attorney in a case involving enforcement of the federal Motor Voter law. When the McCain campaign alleged that, as head of Illinois Project Vote in 1992, Obama had effectively run an arm of ACORN, the Obama campaign denied that ACORN had played any part in Project Vote’s work in 1992. Sanford Newman, the national head of Project Vote in 1992, also widely let it be known that it was not until 1994 that Project Vote was formally placed under the ACORN umbrella.
We already know that these campaign disclaimers were deeply misleading, since documentary evidence confirms that Obama worked closely with Chicago ACORN and the ACORN-controlled SEIU Local 880 on the steering committee of Project Vote in 1992. And of course we’ve just seen evidence of continuing cooperation in 1993 between Obama and the ACORN-controlled New Party, as well as the New Party’s front group, Progressive Chicago. The documentary evidence from 1994 shows that Obama was also working closely with Project Vote, even as it came under direct ACORN control. In fact, Obama was apparently scheming in 1994 to ensure that his close ally and future campaign manager, Carol Harwell, would enjoy a prominent posi- tion within an ACORN-managed Project Vote. So while much was made in 2008 of the fact that Obama ran Project Vote in Illinois well before ACORN assumed formal control, Obama in fact remained deeply involved with Project Vote, even as it was incorporated into ACORN.
In 1994, ACORN assumed formal control of Project Vote, now to be led by Leslie Watson-Davis. The packet of memos in the files of SEIU Local 880 comes from the period when ACORN was consolidating full control of Project Vote, June of 1994. During that time, Local 880 head Keith Kelleher was negotiating with Obama’s close associate Carol Harwell, who was pressing Kelleher to place her on the Project Vote executive committee—on terms that would cut her political competitors out of Project Vote or reduce their power within the group, or both. At the same time, Leslie Watson-Davis traveled to Chicago to explore potential funding sources for Project Vote in Illinois. The memos show Obama helping Watson-Davis, even as he was pressuring Kelleher to grant favorable terms to his ally, Harwell, within the new, ACORN-controlled Project Vote.
In a memo reporting to Zach Polett at ACORN headquarters on her Illinois trip, Watson-Davis recounts her meeting with Obama.172 The two spent an hour together, during which time Obama thoroughly explained Project Vote’s 1992 funding sources. Watson-Davis adds that Obama “is willing to work with me as host of a small, major dollar, reception for individuals who write personal checks of $1,000 plus.” So Obama was not only cooperating with the ACORN-run Project Vote in 1994, he was offering to help them raise money. Watson-Davis appears to have received extensive advice from both outgoing Project Vote head Sanford Newman and Heather Booth on whom to meet in Chicago. This suggests that Booth was an important Newman contact and implies that Booth herself may have played a role, along with her close political ally Jacky Grimshaw, in convincing Newman to select Obama to head up Illinois Project Vote in 1992.173
Even as Obama was offering financial help to Leslie Watson-Davis, he appears to have been withholding critical information from Keith Kelleher, in order to give his close associate and soon-to-be campaign manager Carol Harwell leverage in her negotiations with Project Vote. Kelleher apparently thought of Harwell as a hard-bitten, foul-mouthed, and not particularly appealing partner. In a memo to the leadership of ACORN and Project Vote, Kelleher toyed with the idea of ditching Harwell altogether, even at the possible cost of alienating Obama and losing fund-raising connections that only Obama and Harwell could provide. This is a long, fascinating, and detailed memo. Some excerpts, however, will convey the flavor:
I caution you that she [Harwell] is heavily organizing me around these issues [the nature of her possible role with Project Vote] and I believe Barach [sic] has told her of the national relationship between me, ACORN and Project VOTE … She clearly wants to work with Project VOTE but is not against doing it on her own. I assume from what she says, with Barack and company… . I asked her to get a copy of that list to me. She said she would talk to Barack, who I have already called and received nothing from… . Throughout the conversation, she kept referring to Barack and how she would have to check with Barack about that and this, and that Barack thinks this and that … But it is clear to me that Barack is very influential in this and probably orchestrating a lot of it… . Although on several items concerning overhead and Barack’s advice on budget, etc. she said “Fuck Barack, I don’t think we need all that bullshit this time …” … . Anyway, Barack seems to be the key to this plan… . I mean, what can I say about Carol except, “Fuck her, let’s hire Bob Hurd …” Seriously, though, I think we have a relationship, if one can have a relationship with Carol. She has attended almost all of the Progressive Chicago meetings, perhaps with an eye to pulling this off all the time.174
An interesting detail here is Harwell’s regular attendance at meetings of Progressive Chicago. One of the memos in this packet is from KK to WR (almost certainly Keith Kelleher to Wade Rathke) in which Kelleher asks Rathke’s advice about the future structure of Progressive Chicago.175 Kelleher makes it clear that most of the regular attendees at meetings of Progressive Chicago were staffers of left-leaning politicians (who presumably might someday want to run with New Party/Progressive Chicago support). While Kelleher interprets Harwell’s regular attendance at Progressive Chicago meetings as her maneuvering for a choice role within an ACORN-controlled Project Vote, it seems quite likely that Harwell was also protecting and cultivating Obama’s prospects of running with New Party/Progressive Chicago support. We know that just a year after these memos were written, Obama would launch his first political campaign, with Harwell as his manager. At the time he wrote the memo, of course, Kelleher did not know this.
What makes this extraordinary is that, during the 2008 presidential campaign, Harwell herself was quoted on the Fight the Smears website saying: “Barack did not solicit or seek the New Party endorsement for state senator in 1995.”176 Enough evidence is already public to show that this is false, as we’ll see. In any case, it is at least arguable that, in direct contradiction to her own claims, Carol Harwell herself was actually soliciting a New Party endorsement on Obama’s behalf—by virtue of her close cooperation with the New Party’s front group, Progressive Chicago.
An October 10, 1994, memo to all ACORN offices from Political Director Zach Polett took up the subject of ACORN’s national Motor Voter strategy. That memo includes the following notice: “We have retained Barack Obama with the Davis, Miner law firm on a contingency basis to represent ACORN as local counsel in a suit against the state [of Illinois].”177 Whether Carol Harwell ended up getting a position on the executive committee of Illinois Project Vote, and if so, on what terms, is unclear. At any rate, Obama’s pressure on behalf of Harwell’s bid for influence within Project Vote certainly doesn’t seem to have damaged his standing with ACORN. On the contrary, four months after the Harwell negotiations, Obama was representing ACORN in a major lawsuit.
During the 2008 campaign, Obama was often described by news reports as being one of a team of lawyers representing ACORN in the Motor Voter battle.178 Obama did call in other attorneys from his firm for help. Yet this ACORN memo, along with numerous references to Obama in the files of Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven’s HumanSERVE group, refer to Obama—and Obama alone—as ACORN’s attorney.179 Clearly, it was the Obama connection that drew ACORN to the law firm of Davis, Miner. And although we have little beyond legal papers and a few fax coversheets, it’s likely that Obama was consulting on the Motor Voter case with Cloward and Piven’s group as well (probably by phone), just as Human SERVE itself was closely consulting with ACORN.180
More than ten years before, at the Cooper Union Socialist Scholars Conference at which he decided to become a community organizer, Obama heard Frances Fox Piven open the proceedings, and quite possibly also heard Peter Dreier outline the path from community organizing to politics, through groups like ACORN and Citizen Action. A decade later, Obama was well and truly ensconced in this socialist organizing network. During the 2008 presidential campaign, the only relationship with ACORN Obama would admit to was acting as the group’s attorney in the Motor Voter suit. It’s clear, however, that Obama’s work for ACORN on that suit was simply one event in what was in fact a continuing and ever-deepening political partnership.
SECTION EIGHT
ACORN Meets Clinton
In late July of 1994, a delegation from ACORN met with President Clinton at the White House. It was a landmark moment in ACORN’s continuing efforts to pull the Clinton administration into its various subprime lending schemes. ACORN’s goal was clear: “Our #1 agenda item for the meeting is extension of CRA to non-banks.”181 In other words, ACORN wanted to extend the reach of the Community Reinvestment Act to the three-quarters of the financial system not yet covered by its most important legal weapon. That would hand ACORN a lever with which to force subprime lending onto mortgage companies, mutual funds, and insurance companies—bringing vastly more money into ACORN’s loan counseling program in the process. ACORN also sought to bolster Clinton’s support for the extensive help it was already receiving from HUD Secretary Cisneros and Assistant Secretary Achtenberg.182
In 1994, ACORN’s direct-action campaign was also focused on drawing ever more sectors of the financial system into its lending schemes. ACORN’s presentation to Clinton at the White House highlighted the organization’s just-negotiated $10 million agreement with Allstate to buy mortgage backed securities issued by Fannie Mae, for loans originated under an ACORN program run through NationsBank.183 ACORN had captured the banks, and even Fannie Mae. Now it was aiming to rope insurance companies into its loan counseling program. ACORN’s highest priority was convincing Clinton to support these efforts.
President Clinton had to squeeze his meeting with ACORN into a day on which he was hosting a summit between Jordan’s King Hussein and Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin. Even so, Clinton managed to give the group half an hour, chiefly to discuss extension of CRA to non-banks. As the meeting began, ACORN president Maude Hurd presented Clinton with an ACORN T-shirt, which the president modeled and promised to wear jogging the next day. ACORN then explained the need to extend CRA to non-banks, presenting the Allstate deal as a model. According to ACORN political director Zach Polett, “Clinton jumped on this like white on rice.” While Clinton explained that he probably couldn’t get a bill to ACORN’s liking through Congress, he promised to use “the executive power of the president” to achieve the same ends.184
A National Economic Council staffer in attendance added that the mutual fund industry had already approached the administration to see how it might promote subprime lending. It seems that Wall Street was using the promise of cooperation to forestall legislation intended to extend CRA to non-banks—like the bill written for Maxine Waters by ACORN. Warming to the idea of drawing mutual funds into the subprime lending business, Clinton told his aides to “take this up in earnest.” At this point in his memo recounting the meeting, ACORN’s political director exalts: “This could open up a whole new front for the CRA campaigns, negotiations, and victories.”185
So while much debate has centered on the impact of the Community Reinvestment Act on the financial meltdown, the real story of ACORN’s influence goes far beyond CRA. With substantial help from the Clinton administration and its congressional allies, ACORN was coordinating a campaign of regulation and political pressure designed to spread the practice of subprime lending far beyond the limited sector of the financial system covered by CRA. Analysts like American Enterprise Institute scholar Peter J. Wallison have long argued that, although the CRA itself did not produce enough weak loans to create the financial crisis, CRA initiated a degradation in the quality of mortgages that eventually spread across the broader financial system. Wallison cites Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, along with Clinton administration policy—especially as set by HUD (i.e., Secretary Cisneros)—as key channels through which the dangers of CRA were generalized.186 What emerges from the archival evidence is the extent to which ACORN was acting behind the scenes to orchestrate this entire process.
Was ACORN’s banking campaign part of an intentional effort to provoke a financial meltdown—a sort of variation on the strategy of orchestrated crisis popularized by ACORN advisors Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven in the sixties? I think the answer to this ques- tion is both “no” and “yes.” It’s dubious that either ACORN or its socialist advisors had a specific plan to use the group’s banking campaign to provoke a national mortgage crisis. Cloward and Piven’s plan to flood local and state welfare systems with recipients until President Johnson and the Democratic Congress created a guaranteed annual income was very specific. Moreover, it would have been difficult in the 1990s to even envision the complex chain of events by which ACORN’s efforts ultimately contributed to the financial meltdown of 2008.
On the other hand, it does seem possible—even likely—that in a more general sense, ACORN’s mortgage activism was part of an overall strategy that did seek to contribute to, and certainly to take advantage of, periodic crises in capitalism. We know this because Peter Dreier, an influential advisor to ACORN’s banking campaign, authored such a strategy. Dreier’s idea (almost certainly influenced by Cloward and Piven, with whose work he was quite familiar) was to provoke an entitlement crisis that would undermine America’s fiscal health, thus opening the way to socialism as a solution. A federally sponsored subprime lending policy would fit nicely into this scheme. In a sense, ACORN’s plan was a socialist “twofer,” putting the federal government indirectly on the hook for lending at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, while also handing the country’s most radical community group significant influence over the core of American capitalism. Its tough to see why Dreier would have devoted so much effort to ACORN’s banking campaign if it didn’t advance his plans for encouraging a transition from capitalism to socialism.
In a sense, Dreier’s work helped to “regularize” the orchestrated crisis strategy of Cloward and Piven. No longer would it be necessary to specify a particular path by which a crisis would be provoked. A “transitional strategy” for socialism could simply be pegged to a general expansion of government guarantees beyond the system’s breaking point. Although it would be impossible to know where and when the next crisis would break out, the point was to keep pushing for unsustainable government largesse, while standing ready to take full advantage of the resulting crises to transform the system, bit by bit. This “reformist” stance replaced the premature revolutionary activism of the sixties and early seventies and allowed community organizers to connect their local and piecemeal efforts to a long-term socialist strategy. Barack Obama cut his teeth in a world in which this was the default political stance.
Although evidence from the Illinois ACORN/SEIU Local 880 archives runs out in mid-1994, we know how the story ends. In 1995–96, Obama ran for the Illinois State Senate, with New Party support. As a condition of that endorsement, Obama surely became an active member of this far-left, ACORN-controlled party. In 1995, Obama also represented ACORN in its suit to compel enforcement the federal Motor Voter bill. That same year, in partnership with Bill Ayers, Obama took control of an education foundation called the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, from which he and Ayers channeled money into ACORN’s education projects. During this same period, Obama continued to teach seminars on “power” for ACORN leaders, as he had for some time.187 To top it off, in 1995, Obama helped engineer a major increase in funding for community organizing at the Woods Charitable Fund, supervising a report on the issue in close consultation with Chicago ACORN’s Madeline Talbott.188 That report made it clear that Obama was perfectly aware of ACORN’s use of high-pressure tactics against area businesses. After all, Obama’s friend, Chicago ACORN head Madeline Talbott, was the national field director of ACORN’s “direct-action” assault on America’s banks. Finally, ACORN members served as foot soldiers in Obama’s first and subsequent political campaigns, in gratitude for his longstanding ties to this group.189 (A number of these issues will be taken up in the following chapter.) It’s tough to see how Obama’s ties to ACORN could have been much closer.
During the 2008 presidential campaign, New Party co-founder Joel Rogers attempted to keep a lid on this can of worms with the claim that the New Party never had members to begin with. When pressed, Rogers clarified his meaning: The New Party in Illinois never had its own line on the ballot, so that voters could formally register only as Republicans or Democrats.190 Yet precisely because it had not yet achieved a separate line on the ballot, Chicago’s New Party devised other ways to incorporate members. Members joined the New Party in 1995–96 by signing up and paying dues. Moreover, candidates endorsed by Chicago’s New Party were required to sign a contract mandating “a visible and active relationship” with the party.191 There is no good reason why Obama would have been exempted from this requirement.
The evidence that Obama did in fact join the New Party and sign this contract is very strong. Above all, the Spring 1996 issue of the New Party’s official organ, New Party News, explicitly calls Obama a New Party member.192 That issue of New Party News even features a picture of Obama posing with other victorious New Party–endorsed candidates. Although Obama’s salty-tongued 1996 campaign manager, Carol Harwell, claimed at the Fight the Smears website in 2008 that “Barack did not solicit or seek the New Party endorsement for state senator in 1995,” persuasive contemporaneous evidence to the contrary exists.193 An article on the New Party in the September–October 1995 issue of New Ground, the newsletter of the Chicago Democratic Socialists of America, describes Obama as one of a group of local politicians publicly appealing for New Party endorsement at a July 1995 party meeting.194 Another leftist publication from the period, the Progressive Populist, also identifies Obama as a New Party member.195
Is there any evidence that Obama maintained the “visible and active relationship” with the New Party required by the endorsement contract he almost certainly signed? There is. A report on the New Party in the July–August 1996 issue of New Ground reports on Obama’s participation in a New Party meeting where he expressed his gratitude for party support and invited members to join his task forces on voter education and voter registration.196 In a January 2009 article in The Progressive, longtime Madison, Wisconsin, activist and writer John Nichols recalls appearances with Obama at New Party gatherings in the mid-nineties: “When we spoke together at New Party events in those days, he [Obama] was blunt about his desire to move the Democratic Party off the cautious center where Bill Clinton had wedged it.”197 So the claim that Obama was a New Party member in 1995–96 is supported by powerful evidence from the period in question. Denials in the present by supporters with every reason to protect Obama, like New Party co-founder Joel Rogers, are far less reliable than contemporaneous evidence. Just compare Carol Harwell’s denials with the evidence of what she and Obama were actually doing at the time.
During the 2008 controversy over Obama’s ACORN ties, the Fight the Smears website was forced to backtrack on its denial that Obama had ever been an ACORN trainer.198 My own initial National Review Online piece on Obama’s ACORN ties dug up a 2003–4 Social Policy article by Chicago ACORN leader Toni Foulkes that recounted Obama doing leadership training for the group on a yearly basis.199 When the McCain campaign cited this article, the Obama camp was forced to confess the training and modify its denial at the Fight the Smears website. (By the way, when the ACORN controversy broke during the 2008 campaign, Social Policy pulled the Foulkes article from the Web. By then, however, the cat was out of the bag.)200 Given the fact that a famous profile of Obama’s first political campaign in the Chicago Reader also refers to his leadership training for ACORN, it’s extraordinary that Obama ever denied this fact in the first place.201
The article by Foulkes and the profile in the Chicago Reader both characterize Obama’s relationship to ACORN as long-standing and close. In December of 1995, for example, the Reader quotes Chicago ACORN leader Madeline Talbott saying:
I can’t repeat what most ACORN members think and say about politicians. But Barack has proven himself among our members. He is committed to organizing, to building a democracy. Above all else, he is a good listener, and we accept and respect him as a kindred spirit, a fellow organizer.202
Given all this, it seems fair to say that Barack Obama knowingly lied about his ties to ACORN during the 2008 campaign. But while a “lie” is certainly included in the problem, I think something much larger than a single infraction against the truth is at stake here. Obama’s suppression of his ties to ACORN is part of a systematic and deep-lying pattern of deception about his radical political past. Obama’s campaign stance was so completely at odds with existing information on his ACORN ties—not to mention the archival evidence—that it is a matter for wonder that the candidate kept to his story, and did so with a straight face. Obama could have confessed more, I think, if full exposure of his ACORN ties hadn’t threatened to unravel his entire radical network. As we’ve seen, rightly understood, Obama’s ACORN connection encompasses everything from Reverend Wright, to Bill Ayers, to the Midwest Academy, to socialist crisis theorists like Richard Cloward, Frances Fox Piven, and Peter Dreier, to the socialist thinkers behind the New Party. The role of ACORN in the financial crisis was raised by McCain, and this turned the ACORN issue into political dynamite as well. ACORN is at the center of Barack Obama’s political world, and the very immensity of that fact required nothing less than a brazen attempt at deception when the issue emerged in 2008. Yet the story of ACORN is Obama’s story, too.