So, Obama had no connection to ACORN, huh? http://www.fightthesmears.com/articles/20/acornrumor
And the uncovered document...directly from Chicago's ACORN Chapter...(you may have difficulty downloading the .pdf...the host website's been flooded most of the day. For information on WHY the document is no just being released, see link to CF's website and their comment on the document's status.):Barack Obama Never Organized with ACORN
Discredited Republican voter-suppression guru Ken Blackwell is attacking Barack Obama with naked lies about his supposed connection to ACORN.
• Fact: Barack was never an ACORN community organizer.
• Fact: ACORN never hired Obama as a trainer, organizer, or any type of employee.
• Fact: ACORN was not part of Project Vote, the successful voter registration drive Barack ran in 1992.
In his capacity as an attorney, Barack represented ACORN in a successful lawsuit alongside the U.S. Department of Justice against the state of Illinois to force state compliance with a federal voting access law.
http://www.capitalresearch.org/blog/wp- ... mpaign.pdf
Case Study: Chicago-The Barack Obama Campaign
By Toni Folkes
http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/5645"ACORN'S history of nonpartisan electoral work (voter registration and
voter turnout) and leadership development combined during the March, 2004
primary season to make a big differetice in the level of participation of our communities
in that important election.
ACORN is active in experimenting with methods of increasing voter patiicipation
in our low and moderate income communities in virtually every election. But in
some elections we get to have our cake and eat it too: work on nonpartisan voter
registration and GOTV. which also turns out to benefit the candidate that we hold
dear...
...Obama started building the base years before. For instance. ACORN noticed
him when he was organizing on the far south side of the city with the
Developing Communities Project. He was a very good organizer. When he
returned from law school, we asked him to help us with a lawsuit to challenge the
state of Illinois' refusal to abide by the National Voting Rights Act, also known
as motor voter. Allied only with the state of Mississippi, Illinois had been refusing to allow mass-based voter registration according to the new law. Obama took the case, known as ACORN vs. Edgar
(the name of ihe Republican governor at the time) and we won. Obama then went
on to run a voter registration project with Project VOTE in 1992 that made it possible
for Carol Moseley Braun to win the Senate that year. Project VOTE delivered
50,000 newly registered voters in that campaign (ACORN delivered about
5000 ot them). Since then, we have invited Obama to our leadership training sessions
to run the session on power every year, and, as a result, many of our newly developing
leaders got to know him belore be ever ran tor office. Thus. it was natural for
many of us to be active volunteers in his first campaign tor State Senate and then
his failed bid Tor U.S. Congress in 1996.
By the time he ran for U.S. Senate, we were old friends.
And along about early March, we started to see that the African- American
community had made its move: when Sen. Obama's name was mentioned at our
Southside Summit meeting with 700 people in attendance from three southside
communities, the crowd went crazy. With about a week to go before the election,
it was very clear how the African-American community would vote. But would they
vote in high enough numbers?
It seemed to us that what Obama needed in the March primary was what we
always work lo deliver anyway: increased turnout in our ACORN communities.
ACORN is active on the south and west sides of Chicago, in the south
suburbs and on the east side of Springtleld. the state capital. Most of the
turf where we organize in is African-American, with a growing Latino presence
in Chicago's Little Village and the suburbs...
...As it turned out. Obama won the primary handily, pulling white wards as well as
African American. But no one knew that that would be the case. In each election
we must act as if our work is critical for our communities. That is what we did in
the primary, and we learned something in the process. +"
Toni Foulkes is a Chicago ACORN leader and a member of ACORN's National
Association Board.
