WASHINGTON (at CPAC 2010) — On the campaign trail in 2008 then-candidate Barack Obama did his best to distance himself from his past involvement with the radical advocacy group ACORN, a new video of his explaining the relationship has surfaced.
He doesn’t say anything new. The significance is that there is now video footage of him saying the quotation that had previously only appeared in text form. The quotation, which surfaced in 2008, goes:
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 issues you care about my entire career.
Project Vote (a.k.a. Voting for America Inc.) is the voter registration/get out the vote arm of the ACORN empire of activism. Obama’s campaign paid another ACORN affiliate more than $800,000 to do voter work during the 2008 Democratic primary campaign.
Here is the video, which was released here at the Conservative Political Action Conference by Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.):
At her website, Michelle Malkin has a good summary of what MonCrief is doing and why she’s doing it.
Malkin writes
The sworn testimony, research, and blogging by former ACORN/Project Vote development associate Anita MonCrief have provided an invaluable amount of fodder for reporters (before their editors “cut bait,” that is) and congressional investigators trying to get to the bottom of ACORN’s tax law-undermining, campaign finance disclosure-evading ways.
These are the documents MonCrief’s legal team filed:
ACORN canvassers are facing convictions for voter registration fraud in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, so what does ACORN do?
Sue to change the statute that outlaws the fraud, of course.
The American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania and ACORN’s get-out-the-dead-people-to-vote affiliate Project Vote filed a federal lawsuit today in an effort to snuff out the Keystone State’s anti-election fraud law.
According to the ACLU the law has been misapplied by Allegheny County’s Democratic District Attorney Stephen Zappala Jr., who filed seven charges against former ACORN workers for falsifying voter registration forms. After preliminary hearings, all seven have been ordered to stand trial.
In a press release, the ACLU said the law has been misapplied “to prohibit an organization from using flexible productivity standards and goals to manage paid canvassers.”
Translation: efforts to crack down on election fraud are bad because, well, they crack down on election fraud.
“They already charged the employees, and they’ve hinted they might go after ACORN next,” the New York Times dutifully quoted Witold Walczak of the ACLU saying. “It’s the ACLU’s reading of this, that these kind of laws that restrict an organization’s ability to hire and pay canvassers impacts on voter registration activities, which are constitutionally protected actions.”
The New York Times, of course, is a business partner with one of ACORN’s business partners, and it covered up a potential scandal involving ACORN and the Obama campaign.
Kevin Mooney of the Washington Examiner reports that former ACORN employee Anita MonCrief, who has exposed the inner workings of the corrupt liberal advocacy group, has gone apostate and embraced the conservative cause.