Rick Perlstein on ACORN

by publius

Following up on Eric's post, I just read this very insightful Q & A with Rick Perlstein (author of Nixonland, Before the Storm) on ACORN.  It's about the best analysis I've seen.  The upshot, according to Perlstein, is that ACORN is a largely manufactured crisis. 

A few employees at an extremely marginal organization that does many good things got caught doing some very bad things.  The sound machine then preyed upon liberal journalists' guilt, and got them to treat it like a huge scandal that is somehow relevant to the White House.  Here's Perlstein:

I mean, why would a newspaper like the Post be training its investigative focus on ACORN now? Whether you think well or ill of ACORN, they’re a very marginal group in the grand scheme of things—and about as tied to the White House as the PTA.

The real story is that millions of Americans don’t consider a liberal president legitimate, and they’re moving from that axiom to try to delegitimize the president in the eyes of the majority. And one of the ways they do that is, frankly, by baiting the hook for mainstream media decision-makers who are terrified at the accusation of liberal bias.

He goes on to explain why the initial anti-ACORN outcry in 2008 was manufactured as well.  As they say, read the whole thing.

Comments

[Brett Bellmore]

"Whether you think well or ill of ACORN, they’re a very marginal group in the grand scheme of things—and about as tied to the White House as the PTA."

Obama used to work for the PTA? News to me.

By the way, how can you argue that ACORN is involved in a largely manufactured crisis, as Perlstein does, without ever coming to grips with the nature of the crisis? You can read the "insightful Q&A" without having the slightest clue what the hell is going on; It's so "insightful" as to be totally content free!

[publius]

What is exactly the nature of the crisis? I understand there were some stupid employees, but never really understood how that systematically endangered the Republic

[cleek]

By the way, how can you argue that ACORN is involved in a largely manufactured crisis, as Perlstein does, without ever coming to grips with the nature of the crisis?

since there is no "crisis", your ranting about the "nature of the crisis" seems a bit artificial.

[Brett Bellmore]

I don't think it DID systematically endanger the republic; It's a crisis for ACORN, not the republic. The republican can just cut all ties to ACORN, and the problem is resolved as far as the Republic is concerned, quite expediently.

And I would argue, advising a stranger on how to run a brothel for voluntary prostitutes of adult status, stupid. Advising a stranger on how to run a brothel for pre-adult sex slaves is something rather different and worse than "stupid".

[someotherdude]

publius,

Have they interviewed the "stupid employees"?

Usually, investigative reporting goes on to ask those who are being investigated why they acted in the way they did. Did these women think it was a joke? Did they actually fill out papers and sign them, or were they just humoring some naive "street folk," who didn't fit the profile they are used to?

Poor women have the capability to be ironic.

And considering the actual raping and pillaging most Merc. Companies engage in, the humoring of a couple of delusional kids about creating a brothel for the pimp's election coffers, seems small potatoes.

[Brett Bellmore]

"since there is no "crisis", your ranting about the "nature of the crisis" seems a bit artificial."

That's a rather amusing take on the situation. However, whether you want to call it a "crisis", a "manufactured crisis", a "PR war", or what have you, the fact remains that Perlstein's "insightful Q&A" is so lacking in any connection to the present events that nobody reading it would have the slightest clue why the Senate voted 83-7 to defund ACORN. Embezzlement? Fraud? A sex scandal? The whole question of what it's about was deliberately avoided.

Perhaps on the theory that not everybody finds under-aged sex slaves an amusing concept.

[brent]

Obama used to work for the PTA? News to me.

Given that he has two daughters in school, I am certain that, somewhere along the line, Obama signed something or participated in something that was at least peripherally related to activities of a Parent Teacher association somewhere. So yes, that would make his involvement with that group roughly equivalent to his involvement with ACORN which, I suspect you know, is quite insubstantial. He worked for them for three unpaid hours in 1995 and they were one of many plaintiffs which included the Justice Department in a lawsuit he participated in against the State of Illinois to expand voting access.

This attempt to damn ACORN as an organization with these flimsy accusations of wrongdoing is really pretty pathetic but still somehow nowhere near as pathetic as the attempt to connect Obama to them.

[liberal japonicus]

Wow, Brett's scare quote ratio is thru the roof. Someone get him a Xanax.

[Anarch]

without ever coming to grips with the nature of the crisis?

The crisis is that ACORN helps register black voters to vote Democratic.

Period.

Everything is else is sound and fury, signifying nothing.

[Brett Bellmore]

I'd really much rather damn the media in this instance. Nothing should reach this point with so little notice in the media, but it's happening over and over with this administration that some scandal, (Yes, it's a scandal even if you don't care.) reaches the point where a nominee has to be withdrawn, or something comparable, with next to no media attention.

I mean, it's great and all that the internet allows us to route around the MSM, but it's still an outrage that the MSM has to be routed around. They ought to be addressing things like this, even if it's only to debunk them, not doing their best to protect the administration.

[publius]

I actually the outrage is that even Jon Stewart went wankerous on this. The fact that Congress voted to defund shows how successfully the manufacturing was, but not necessarily why this is a big deal.

Pretty much the entire 2008 stuff was BS. And they happened to catch a good video -- i think it's actually more of a testament of the abiility of video to convey information/messaging more powerfully than text.

[Brett Bellmore]

No, the outrage is the spiking of any story which would inconvenience Obama; The news media ought to be addressing even BS, if only as a story about how it's BS. But instead, they're almost completely ignoring things that build to this point.

It's like they're trying their best to construct an alternate universe where these things don't exist, convinced that if they ignore them hard enough, they'll go away. But they lost that level of dominance years ago.

Or maybe they're just trying to buy good terms for their own bailout.

[publius]

Honestly -- what is the broader story. I'm asking sincerely. It's looks like a few employees doing something stupid. I mean, if someone spits on my pizza at Domino's, that doesnt implicate the GOP right? (even though Dominos guy is a big Republican).

I'm actually pissed at Jon Stewart -- even he, sadly, is not above the internalized fear/guilt of being liberal

[brent]

No, the outrage is the spiking of any story which would inconvenience Obama;

Again Brett, inconvenience him how? He doesn't have anything to do with ACORN. The story here, such as it is, is the lengths that the right will go to to manufacture some support for their ridiculous mythologies.

ACORN is a community organization designed to help poor people. That is all they are. That is all they have ever been. They do not sit at the levers of power and their irrelevance to the president has been well established. The significance of this bit of business beyond its ability to harm an organization that provides resources to the poor is approximately nil times infinity.

So why should the media be interested in this more than say no-bid contracts for Halliburton or the corrupting influence of corporations like EXXON in Nigeria. Stories which they also basically ignore. Minor non-crimes like this take place all over every town in America, hundreds, perhaps thousands of times a day. Their impact on the lives of most people approaches zero. Other than the fact that this particular scandal means that some poor people will now have slightly less power over their lives, how is this story even minimally newsworthy? Other than the fact that the right has managed to construct another of their bizarre paranoid fantasies, this time around the earth shattering power of a poor people's advocacy group that operates on a shoestring budget, why on Earth should anyone care about this?

The unfortunate thing about all of this is that too many in the media, because they are a bit stupid and craven, are now buying into the notion that the right's fever dreams are somehow worthy of examination by rational people. Go figure.

[KCinDC]

Brett, are you seriously complaining about the media supposedly constructing an alternate universe only a week after media reports were successfully contaminated by the right wing's constructed alternate universe in which 2 million tea partiers converged on the National Mall and "czars" are an invention of Obama and not part of any branch of government?

[Firebert]

The funny(?) part is that the ACORN employees in question actually did the right thing and promptly contacted the authorities.

[gwangung]

And I would argue, advising a stranger on how to run a brothel for voluntary prostitutes of adult status, stupid.

I would argue that anyone who believes that actually happened is...naive. And not making use of all of the information in the media. And not particularly cognizant of strategies to handle less than rational people off the street.

I think ACORN is being targeted precisely because it's not cash rich and it's extremely powerless. It doesn't have the resources of larger collectivities like corporations and governments. Focussing on ACORN is the act of a bully.

[Carleton Wu]

The funny(?) part is that the ACORN employees in question actually did the right thing and promptly contacted the authorities.

No, the *funny* part is that Brett's been exposed to that information before, and is still repeating his talking points.
The *hilarious* part is how he then goes into righteous indignation that the MSM and the liberals don't echo his faux outrage.
Even Brett does not take Brett seriously.

[Brett Bellmore]

"The funny(?) part is that the ACORN employees in question actually did the right thing and promptly contacted the authorities."

This whole discussion has been a demonstration if innumeracy as a defense mechanism. A handful of the sample becomes a handful out of thousands, when the sample was less than a dozen. And now, some of the ACORN employees doing the right thing becomes "the" ACORN employees did the right thing.

Look, be honest: If ACORN were affiliated with the Republican party, would you accept any of these excuses for even a fleeting instant?

[Gregory]

And now, some of the ACORN employees doing the right thing becomes "the" ACORN employees did the right thing.

"The funny(?) part is that the ACORN employees in question actually did the right thing and promptly contacted the authorities."

Happy to help.

The *hysterical* part is that Bellmore tosses out accusations of partisan intellectual dishonesty.

[Uncle Kvetch]

Obama used to work for the PTA? News to me.

So...people are personally responsible for every action of every employee of every organization they've ever worked for? In perpetuity?

Even for a faux-scandal, this one is mind-blowing.

[John Thullen]

According to libertarian and Republican shouters at school board meetings I used to attend, the PTA is a communist organization devoted to perverting our children.

Believe me, when we have video of President Obama attending a PTA meeting, we'll have the conclusive evidence required for impeachment.

[russell]

By the way, how can you argue that ACORN is involved in a largely manufactured crisis, as Perlstein does, without ever coming to grips with the nature of the crisis?

OK, I'm gonna burn my tu quoque for the week.

If we want to pursue the Great ACORN Scandal any further, I in turn want Ken Mehlman under oath on the NH phone jamming stuff. You know, where guys that actually were convicted of, and did time for, screwing with the election process, are on record as making many phone calls to RNC offices in the damned White House in the week or two before the jamming went down.

You give me that, and then we can talk about how any of this ACORN bullsh*t is remotely relevant to anything whatsoever.

Barring that, I'll thank you to give it a rest. Or not, whatever you like, but it's crap.

If you want to know what a "manufactured crisis" is, a guy wearing his grandma's chinchilla coat and pretending to be a pimp, walking into an advocacy organization and asking for advice on how to run his brothel would basically qualify as "manufactured".

Anarch at 11:45 has it. Conservatives hate ACORN because they register poor people to vote, and those people vote for Democrats.

Conservatives in fact go to some lengths to prevent those people from voting, and have done so as long as I've been alive. Longer than that, for that matter. If the conservatives in this country would knock that sh*t the hell off, organizations like ACORN wouldn't be needed.

Here's my hint of the week for conservatives. Want to reach out to poor people and minorities? Quit trying to keep them from voting.

Baby steps, y'all.

But, of course, the people who do things like that aren't True Conservatives. No True Conservative would ever do such a thing.

I'm not here to defend ACORN, because they appear to have some real issues. Not at the street level, but in terms of their own governance as an organization. But the "scandal" under discussion is utter bullsh*t.

[Tyro]

If ACORN were affiliated with the Republican party, would you accept any of these excuses for even a fleeting instant?

This latest group of threads is precisely about the fact that individuals who engage in actual wrongdoing do not cause the entire organization to face national condemnation. Except for ACORN, which is an organization that Republicans have been obsessed with for a while, despite not actually doing anything wrong.

In fact, Brett, the specific focus of the ire against ACORN lately seems to be directed at an individual who called the police on a republican play-actor trying to pretend to have prostitutes. Furthermore, you have yet to point to anyone who actually broke the law.

Meanwhile, Blackwater employees murdered people and CIA contractors tortured people.

[someotherdude]

Considering the amount of prostitution and adultery (which is still illegal in many states) engaged by Republican Party politicians, there should be RICO investigations!

[brent]

Look, be honest: If ACORN were affiliated with the Republican party, would you accept any of these excuses for even a fleeting instant?

What excuses do you mean? Excuses for what exactly? It seems to me that there have been two types of responses to this. Some defend what the ACORN employees did. Others argue that despite all the braying from the right, there really isn't much of a story here because it is fundamentally irrelevant to any issue of National import except in the sense that it is yet another piece in the unending war on poor people by various Republican operatives. Neither of those arguments is reasonably described as an "excuse."

So would "we" accept the same sort of defense of a right-leaning organization whose employees were caught up in a similar scandal. I can only speak for myself, but I am entirely amenable, for instance, to the argument that say, Ashley Todd is responsible for her own actions as opposed to the Pittsburgh Republican party that she worked for.

I am more skeptical, however, about astroturfing firms that send out forged letters blaming it on employee initiative. As with anything, the details of the story matter and there is no part of the ACORN story that counts as anything other than a lazy and disingenuous smear.

But in the end, I would be more than happy to leave things exactly as they are. Right wing hysteria notwithstanding, ACORN really does not get that much money from the Federal government. They will be hurt by this but they will survive and continue to do what they have been doing for decades, helping poor people fight for their rights using their strained and limited resources. The elements of the military industrial complex that are caught under the same legislative rules will, of course, not fare so well and then maybe we could repurpose some of those billions toward helping enrich our society as opposed to fattening the pockets of multimillionaires/billionaires. That would be a perfectly acceptable trade off in my opinion.

I am joking of course. There is no chance at all that our craven political leaders will allow the military industry to suffer the indignity of having to follow the same rules as a poor people's advocacy group but its a nice dream.

[cleek]

he fact remains that Perlstein's "insightful Q&A" is so lacking in any connection to the present events that nobody reading it would have the slightest clue why the Senate voted 83-7 to defund ACORN

this just in: two people who are having a discussion about topics with which they are both familiar will sometimes fail to deliver an exposition sufficient for a third party who isn't familiar with those topics to develop a clear understanding of the underlying issues. this is unfortunate for the third party, but makes life much simpler for anyone who does know the topics.

you'll also note that graduate level physics texts do not start with elementary school math and build from there. sometimes you can assume the reader knows a thing or two about the topic at hand.

of course if the act of counting was clear evidence of a fiendish liberal plot to destroy the republic, i can assume you'd want every text book in the land to start with a though discussion of "cleek has two apples, if Mrs Cleek buys him two more, how many apples does cleek have now?"

[Marty]

"Conservatives in fact go to some lengths to prevent those people from voting, and have done so as long as I've been alive. Longer than that, for that matter. If the conservatives in this country would knock that sh*t the hell off, organizations like ACORN wouldn't be needed. [...] But, of course, the people who do things like that aren't True Conservatives. No True Conservative would ever do such a thing.

I'm not here to defend ACORN, because they appear to have some real issues. Not at the street level, but in terms of their own governance as an organization. But the "scandal" under discussion is utter bullsh*t."

Even absent "conservative" efforts voter registration in poor, primarily Democratic, areas would still be a problem, an organization "like" ACORN would still have a valuable role in helping these folks get registered and get to vote.

I agree with all of the rest of this, in this sense: The trigger for all of this is a tempest in a teapot. Some people, somewhere, reacted badly to a staged challenge of their individual moral compass, others reacted very well. That would be true in any organization, group, club, company, anywhere.

If I have problems with ACORN at any level, this isn't the smoking gun that lets me force the issue. It just isn't.

And, any true conservative wants everyone to vote.

[Hartmut]

So...people are personally responsible for every action of every employee of every organization they've ever worked for? In perpetuity?

Yes, if any of these organizations (or any part or member of it) is suspected of having (or having had) any connection to people suspected of being terrorists. Any donation or help given to those organizations or parts or members thereof at any time will also legally taint the donator. It's the political equivalent of a preexisting condition. At least that is how the law was interpreted under Chain-Eye/Bush.

[JustMe]

Once again, what we see is Brett, the self-styled libertarian, going to impressive lengths to mindlessly parrot right wing talking points and anxieties about ACORN. What a coincidence that an independent thinker like himself would reflect the same set of talking points that were fed to him by a right-wing flood-the-zone talking-points assault.

[Jadegold]

Some of you may have heard of the Yes Men; essentially, their schtick is to punk large corporations. One of their gags was to pretend they were Dow Chemical economists who had developed a model for determining the number of "acceptable deaths" could be withstood in the course of making large profits.

They proposed this maodel to a gathering of bankers, some of whom were interested enough to request more information. Note these bankers weren't low-level employees but folks who actually made policy at their institutions.

[Larv]

I think russell at 8:47 and Marty at 9:59 make good points.

Even if you accept that the ACORN employees believed that the aspiring ratf**kers were really a pimp and his ho, there wouldn't be much of a scandal. And I think that even that is highly unlikely. A question for those who've watched all the videos: I've only seen one, and it was hard to see what the "pimp" was wearing. I've seen stills where he's wearing that ridiculous pimpsuit with all the bling and fur; is he wearing that in all the videos? Do we know how he's dressed? Because in today's world, if somebody in that getup came in and asked those kinds of questions, my first instinct would be to assume I was in a Borat/Punk'd-style movie or TV show and play along. I think that's a much more likely explanation than the alternatives. If there's a video where the "pimp" is less obviously acting out a role I'd like to be directed to it.

[John Thullen]

Gosh, Mr. Jadegold, is there big money to be made in the "acceptable death" racket?

Tell me more. I'm all ears.

What are the tax consequences?

Is there some way to vertically integrate the acceptable death industry to make sure we get the funeral/burial/casket business at the back end while still maximizing the taking-health-insurance-premiums-and-denying-claims business on the front end?

Or do we handle this through our landfill subsidiaries?

If this scheme is successful, we can expand into the even higher margin "unacceptable deaths" market through the Bermuda-based, tax-free shell corporation we've set up through Goldman Sachs.

------------ I wish one of the ACORN workers would have inquired of the pimp if his skank was open for business for a quickie, right there in the office and maybe even offered cash, right on camera.

I wonder which one would have caught the cooties?

I'm betting the ACORN worker would have had to see a performance doctor for some performance pencillin and herpes salve after that encounter.

[sanbikinoraion]

This whole discussion has been a demonstration if innumeracy as a defense mechanism. A handful of the sample becomes a handful out of thousands, when the sample was less than a dozen.

Sorry, you're accusing other people of innumeracy? When you're perfectly aware that a small "sample" (and let's not pretend there was anything scientific going on here) with no control group, no randomization, no blinding, is anything like a reasonable test?

Give it up, dude. Even Marty disagrees with you.

[magistra]

One of the aspects that hasn't been mentioned is that this kind of trick is an ideal way of undermining the work of ACORN generally even if they hadn't lost funding in the end, because it undermines trust in the people they're trying to help.

If when someone comes to you for assistance, at the back of your mind there is the thought: 'Suppose what I say is being taped and could be used to get me sacked by someone malicious?' then you're not going to treat them the same. You're going to be more concerned about covering your back then how you help them. You can't explain to them how a system might work in practice, because that might be thought to try and help them game the system. If they suggest they're doing anything illegal you must stop the session there and then and report them, because if you wait till the next day it may be your head on the line. They're not simply someone in need anymore, they're also a potential threat to you.

It's the same pattern you see in over-regulated professions like teaching: if anything you do to help someone that isn't officially approved in advance might harm your career you don't do it. You just stick to the safe minimum. So ACORN becomes less helpful as an organisation to the poor and I'm sure that makes some people very happy.

[John Thullen]

A performance murderer from the Republican Party butchered a Census worker (part-time teacher) in Kentucky, hanging him from a tree and carving "FED" on him.

Anyone know where Michelle Bachmann was at the time of the murder?

Meanwhile, there's a shortage of bullets in America.

I sure hope liberals, ACORN workers, and Federal employees are buying their fair share.

Will James Inhofe be stopped at the border and arrested for threatening revolution in America and then undermining U.S. foreign policy while abroad.

Nope.

The Census worker murder is the beginning of a slow-motion Oklahoma City.