ACORN CREEPs Into The News

I had a flashback this morning as I listened to more news regarding ACORN and their potentially illegal practices in voter registration. There are now reports of counties with more registered voters than population, plus tapes of this non profit organization’s obvious, yet illegal, support of a political candidate (Obama). Out of nowhere CREEP popped into my mind. Now that is a blast from the past.

For anyone under 50, CREEP was the Committee to ReElect the President and in this case the President was Nixon. Everyone is familiar with Watergate, the hotel where the burglaries took place, but few remember that it was at the direction of CREEP. So why does ACORN remind me of CREEP, other than the fact they both have memorable acronyms?

Richard Nixon would have clearly won his second term without the machinations of McCord, Dean, Mitchell etc. breaking into and wiretapping the offices of the Democrat Party. Assuming Obama wins in two weeks, I would think he still would have won even without ACORN’s help. Yes, it might be a lot closer race without the millions of voters registered legally and illegally by ACORN but he probably might still be the next president.

Yet thanks to the illegalities of ACORN all the votes cast for Obama in areas in which ACORN was active will be questionable. Additionally, the millions raised by ACORN will now be thoroughly investigated to see if any money was diverted to Obama’s campaign. Even the NY Times, which had previously refused to write about ACORN, is now investigating this organization because of the growing accusations.

Just as in the case with CREEP, I think the overriding problem is hubris combined with stupidity. For how arrogant and dumb can you be for an ACORN executive to give a speech at an ACORN event in which they openly and forcefully support Obama while they were being taped? Did they not know it was illegal for a non profit organization to support a candidate? Or did they think that no one would dare to take them to task because Obama is the chosen one who must be elected? Additionally can’t anyone count in this organization? It is one thing to knowingly register false names but to end up with more supposedly registered voters than there is a voting population is absurd. (Yes a few areas might be attributable to college campuses but this doesn’t explain all of them.)

Whatever the reasons, ACORN is now beginning to tarnish Obama’s campaign.  Unfortunately, by now ACORN and Obama are clearly tied together in the public’s mind such that any illegalities by ACORN will reflect on to Obama. Even if Obama wins, I believe that the investigations into ACORN will continue. Unlike CREEP which eventually brought down Nixon’s presidency I sincerely doubt if ACORN’s activities could do the same to Obama. An obvious difference is that Obama will have a sympathetic Congress and media who will do all that they can to shield Obama from any criminal activities by ACORN.

I have no idea how all of this will play out. It is also important to remember that it wasn’t CREEP’s activities as much as it was the cover up afterwards that caused Nixon’s downfall. It will be interesting to watch how both ACORN and Obama react to these newest charges.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

PS - I wanted to add a short follow up to my blog about the first day of early voting in Florida. I had said that two of my friends had given up due to the long lines but that I expected they would try again. They did. Yesterday, on the second day of early voting, my friend returned to the downtown Orlando polling place where once again the parking lot was full and there was a long line. This time she was prepared for this and thinking that it might never get much better she spent the 90 minutes needed to park, stand in line and then vote. My second friend, who lived in an upper income suburb, also returned to his polling spot. This time there were plenty of parking spaces and no lines, and he was in and out in about 5 minutes. Considering the demographic trend of downtown urban voters vs. suburban upper income voters, this does not bode well for McCain….