| Home Front: Politix |
| Acorn Who? |
| 2009-09-22 |
| A refresher course. Obama heads for the high grass. Only one of the five television networks that interviewed President Obama for their Sunday shows bothered to ask him about Acorn, the left-wing community organizing group whose federal funding was cut off last week by an overwhelming vote in Congress. "Frankly, it's not something I've followed closely," Mr. Obama claimed, adding he wasn't even aware the group had been the recipient of significant federal funding. "This is not the biggest issue facing the country. It's not something I'm paying a lot of attention to," he said. Mr. Obama added that an investigation of Acorn was appropriate after an amateur hidden-camera investigation had found Acorn offices willing to abet prostitution, but he carefully declined to say whether he would approve a federal cutoff of funds to the group. Mr. Obama took great pains to act as if he barely knew about Acorn. In fact, his association goes back almost 20 years. In 1991, he took time off from his law firm to run a voter-registration drive for Project Vote, an Acorn partner that was soon fully absorbed under the Acorn umbrella. The drive registered 135,000 voters and was considered a major factor in the upset victory of Democrat Carol Moseley Braun over incumbent Democratic Senator Alan Dixon in the 1992 Democratic Senate primary. Mr. Obama's success made him a hot commodity on the community organizing circuit. He became a top trainer at Acorn's Chicago conferences. In 1995, he became Acorn's attorney, participating in a landmark case to force the state of Illinois to implement the federal Motor Voter Law. That law's loose voter registration requirements would later be exploited by Acorn employees in an effort to flood voter rolls with fake names. In 1996, Mr. Obama filled out a questionnaire listing key supporters for his campaign for the Illinois Senate. He put Acorn first (it was not an alphabetical list). In the U.S. Senate, Mr. Obama became the leading critic of Voter ID laws, whose overturn was a top Acorn priority. In 2007, in a speech to Acorn's leaders prior to their political arm's endorsement of his presidential campaign, Mr. Obama was effusive: "I've been fighting alongside of Acorn on issues you care about my entire career. Even before I was an elected official, when I ran Project Vote in Illinois, Acorn was smack dab in the middle of it, and we appreciate your work." But the Obama campaign didn't appear eager to discuss the candidate's ties to Acorn. Its press operation vividly denied Mr. Obama had been an Acorn trainer until the New York Times uncovered records demonstrating that he had been. The Obama campaign also gave Citizens Consulting, Inc., an Acorn subsidiary, $832,000 for get-out-the-vote activities in key primary states. In filings with the Federal Election Commission, the Obama campaign listed the payments as "staging, sound, lighting," only correcting the filings after the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review revealed their true nature. Given his longstanding ties with Acorn, President Obama's protestations of ignorance or disinterest in the group's latest scandal seem preposterous. Here's hoping White House reporters will press the president to clarify just how much he really knows about Acorn and when he knew it. |
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| NYC mayor Bloomberg to call for Gov't of National Unity | |||
| 2007-12-30 | |||
Others who will be at the Jan. 7 session at the University of Oklahoma said that if the likely nominees of the two parties do not pledge to "go beyond tokenism" in building an administration that seeks national consensus, they will be prepared to back Bloomberg or someone else in a third-party campaign for president. The list of attendees suggests the group could muster the financial and political firepower to make the threat of such a candidacy real. Conveners of the meeting include such prominent Democrats as former senators Sam Nunn of Georgia, Charles Robb of Virginia and David Boren of Oklahoma, and former presidential candidate Gary Hart. Republican attendees are to include Sen. Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, former party chairman Bill Brock, former Sen. John Danforth of Missouri and former New Jersey Gov. Christine Todd Whitman.
Others who have indicated they plan to attend the one-day session include William Cohen, former Republican senator from Maine and defense secretary in the second Clinton administration; Alan Dixon, former Democratic senator from Illinois; Bob Graham, former Democratic senator from Florida; Jim Leach, former Republican congressman from Iowa; Susan Eisenhower, a political consultant and granddaughter of former President Eisenhower; David Abshire, president of the Center for the Study of the Presidency; and Edward Perkins, a former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. Bloomberg, a former Democrat who was elected mayor of New York as a Republican, left the GOP over the summer to become an independent. While disclaiming any plan to run for president in 2008, he has continued to fuel speculation by traveling widely and speaking out on domestic and international issues. The mayor, a billionaire many times over, presumably could self-finance even a late-starting candidacy. "As mayor, he has seen far too often how hyperpartisanship in Washington has gotten in the way of making progress on a host of issues," said Bloomberg's press secretary, Stu Loeser. "He looks forward to sitting down and discussing this with other leaders." Until plans for the meeting were disclosed, the most concrete public move toward any kind of independent candidacy was by Unity08, a group planning an online nominating convention to pick either an independent candidate or a ticket combining a Republican and a Democrat. The sponsors, an eclectic mix of consultants who have worked for candidates ranging from Democrat Jimmy Carter to Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., have not aligned with a specific prospect. Some people with high-level political and governmental credentials are moving to put muscle behind the new effort. A letter from Nunn and Boren sent to those who plan to attend the Jan. 7 session said "our political system is, at the least, badly bent and many are concluding that it is broken at a time ... America must lead boldly at home and abroad. Partisan polarization is preventing us from uniting to meet the challenges that we must face if we are to prevent further erosion in America's power of leadership and example." At the session, Boren said, participants will try to draft a statement on such issues as the need to "rebuild and reconfigure our military forces" and restoring U.S. credibility in the world. "Today, we are a house divided," the letter said. "We believe that the next president must be able to call for a unity of effort by choosing the best talent available without regard to political party to help lead our nation."
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