Barack's Nuts

Did Barack work for ACORN?

While Barack says he never worked for ACORN in any capacity, might he be lying, or, perhaps, parsing - working with as opposed to for?

"Obama took the case, known as ACORN vs. Edgar (the name of the 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 5,000 of 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 before he ever ran for office. Thus it was natural for many of us to be active volunteers in his first campaign for State Senate and then his failed bid for U.S. Congress in 1996. By the time he ran for U.S. Senate, we were old friends."

At his Fight the Smears website, Barack denies the linkage.

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.

For me, Barack's denial is confession enough, as it creates more questions than answers. Why is he so horrified to be linked to ACORN - Why is that so bad? And if it's such a disgusting organization, why did he visit each year to train, and why did he represent them?

Barack learned an important campaign lesson from the Jeremiah Wright scandal - never tell the truth about your radical past. Since then, he's pretended not to know Michael Pfleger, one of his self-avowed personal advisers, he's pretended not to really know Bill Ayers (just a guy in my neighborhood), and now he's struggling to keep ACORN at some arbitrary distance to avoid disclosing the truth.

Fight over details and semantics all you want. These are Barack's People.

Which explains why, when he wanted help with voter registration, he turned to ACORN.

U.S. Sen. Barack Obama’s presidential campaign paid more than $800,000 to an offshoot of ACORN, the liberal Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now for services the Democrat’s campaign says it mistakenly misrepresented in federal reports.

Who cares whether he worked for them when we know they work for him?