O'Keefe's efforts probably wouldn't have had any impact except that it built on the Republican Party's ongoing war against ACORN that began in 2004 and accelerated during the 2008 presidential campaign. Karl Rove (President Bush's top political adviser) and conservative Republicans orchestrated an attack on Acorn for alleged "voter fraud," as part of a campaign to suppress the voting of minorities and the poor. As part of this effort, a U.S. Attorney was asked to investigate ACORN. The investigation came up empty-handed, but the GOP operatives persisted. The allegations of "voter fraud" hit a peak in October 2008, aided by Arizona Sen. John McCain's charge in a presidential debate with Barack Obama that Acorn "is now on the verge of maybe perpetrating one of the greatest frauds in voter history in this country, maybe destroying the fabric of democracy." He demanded that Mr. Obama disclose his ties to Acorn. Senator McCain frequently repeated those accusations on the campaign trail.
Although the voter fraud never materialized, the stories planted during the election season yielded a bountiful crop of misinformation. Particularly troubling was the mainstream news media's unwitting complicity in the conservative campaign to frame ACORN. For example, 80.3 percent of the print and broadcast stories about ACORN's alleged voter fraud failed to mention that ACORN itself was reporting voter-registration irregularities to authorities, as required by law.
Thanks to the combination of Republican attacks and O'Keefe's videos, ACORN lost considerable credibility among foundations and one-time political allies. Congress voted to cut off ACORN's federal funds (a tiny part of its overall budget) and to end ACORN's ability to provide free tax preparation clinics for the poor and to help Census workers recruit people to fill out the forms. Republican politicians, like Cong. Darrel Issa of California, called ACORN "corrupt." Even some of ACORN's former Democratic allies kept their distance, and silence, when ACORN was under attack. No one from the Obama administration, including HUD Secretary Shawn Donovan, who had worked closely with ACORN in New York, uttered a word in ACORN's defense. Only seven senators -- six Democrats and one Independent -- came to ACORN's defense, notably Democratic Senator Richard Durbin of Illinois and Independent Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont. The Democrats' timidity encouraged the Right -- including Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, and other talk show lunatics as well as conservative Republican zealots like Darrell Issa -- to destroy ACORN's reputation.
They were successful. By October 2008, a national Rasmussen poll found that 60% of likely voters had a slightly unfavorable or very unfavorable opinion of ACORN. The same poll reported that 45% believed that ACORN was consciously trying to register people to vote multiple times in violation of election laws. By November 2009, another survey found that 26% of Americans - and 52% of Republicans -- believed that ACORN had stolen the election for Obama. Overall 11% of Americans viewed ACORN favorably while 53% had a negative opinion of the group. ACORN has become well known, but what most Americans know about it is wrong, based on controversies manufactured by the group's long-time enemies.
The controversy surrounding the ACORN videos generated lots of news stories. But few of the stories about the videos recounted O'Keefe's history as a right-wing zealot, who had previously developed hidden camera stories for a conservative magazine he founded at Rutgers University. Besides Breitbart, O'Keefe's other accomplice was Ms. Giles, a 20-year-old journalism student and surfer buff, who previously interned with the conservative National Journalism Center in Washington, D.C. She is the eldest daughter of a conservative Christian minister in Miami. Giles's father, Doug Giles, served as minister of the ultra-conservative ClashChurch near Miami, where he proclaimed that liberals "spit on the Word of God." He had complained of what he called the evils of the Obama administration and its alliance with ACORN.
O'Keefe and Giles despised and feared ACORN. " [ACORN's] world is a revolutionary, socialistic, atheistic world, where all means are justifiable," said O'Keefe, on a conservative web site. "And they create chaos, again, for it's own sake." O'Keefe mistakenly believed that ACORN received "billions" in tax money.
O'Keefe and Giles targeted ACORN, though, not to expose any bad advice being doled out by the mortgage counselors, but for the same reason that the political right: to put an end to ACORN's massive voter-registration drives that brought out poor African Americans and Latinos to cast ballots against Republicans. "Politicians are getting elected single-handedly due to this organization," he told the press in a Los Angeles Times story on September 19, 2009. O'Keefe and Giles timed the release of the video to distract public attention away from Obama's September 9 speech on health care reform.
This week, ACORN's chief executive, Bertha Lewis, correctly said the arrest was further evidence of that O'Keefe's "disregards the law in pursuit of his extremist agenda."
ACORN spokesman Kevin Whelan said that the arrest calls O'Keefe's credibility into question, and correctly pointed out the "edited (ACORN videos) tried to make things look as bad as possible."
So perhaps this is a good time for the mainstream press to get the ACORN story right.
Last month, facts exonerating ACORN began to emerge. On December 7 an independent report by Scott Harshbarger, the former Massachusetts Attorney General and former president of Common Cause, cleared ACORN of any illegal conduct. The report stated, "While some of the advice and counsel given by ACORN employees and volunteers was clearly inappropriate and unprofessional, we did not find a pattern of intentional, illegal conduct by ACORN staff; in fact, there is no evidence that action, illegal or otherwise, was taken by any ACORN employee on behalf of the videographers." His report also noted that the videos were doctored and misleading.
"The videos that have been released appear to have been edited, in some cases substantially, including the insertion of a substitute voice-over for significant portions of Mr. O'Keefe's and Ms. Giles's comments, which makes it difficult to determine the questions to which ACORN employees are responding. A comparison of the publicly available transcripts to the released videos confirms that large portions of the original video have been omitted from the released versions."
Further, the Harshbarger report reinforced criticism of the mainstream media's handling of the ACORN story, including the way CNN played the "prostitution scandal" videotapes over and over again. The mainstream press has continuously botched the ACORN story by repeating rather than fact-checking the allegations.
For example, the Associated Press story about Harshbarger's report, published in the Washington Post and other newspapers, didn't mention that the conservative videographers rebuffed attempts by Harshbarger to interview them and refused to permit him to review the unedited tapes so he could compare the raw footage with versions that were released. Most major news outlets, which went overboard reporting the ACORN video "scandal," did not even mention the report.
Five days after the report was released, on December 12, 2009, federal judge Nina Gershon blocked U.S. officials from enforcing the funding ban on ACORN. She ruled that Congress had violated the Constitution's ban on bills of attainder, legislation that punishes a specific person or group without a fair hearing. ACORN lawyers quoted several Republicans making unsubstantiated accusations about ACORN being a criminal organization that deserved to be punished.
"[ACORN has] been singled out by Congress for punishment that directly and immediately affects their ability to continue to obtain federal funding, in the absence of any judicial, or even administrative, process of adjudicating guilt," Gershon wrote in her decision. Soon after the decision, some of ACORN's projects began receiving federal funds, including between $40,000 and $60,000 for housing assistance.
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