President Barack Obama downplaying ACORN's corruption story
President Obama hit the cable networks this weekend to promote his healthcare plan to America. ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, Univision and the Late Show with David Letterman all got interviews. Fox news, which is number one network in ratings, did not get any. One explanation, among many others, might be the evolving story with the community organization ACORN, which was reflected in a number of programs at Fox News hosted by Sean Hannity, Bill O'Reilly, Glenn Beck, Greta VanSustern, among others.
Relations between President Obama and ACORN go back in time. In 1991, Obama, while being a lawyer took time off from his law firm to run a voter-registration program for Project Vote, an Acorn partner, which lately merged with ACORN. This program 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. Later, Barack Obama 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.
Below is the transcript (and video) of a segment of the ABC's interview with George Stephanopoulos on Sunday, Sept. 20, 2009, where is President Obama’s reaction to George Stephanopoulos’ questions about ACORN.
PRESIDENT OBAMA: If you say something outrageous, you're there in a hot second.
STEPHANOPOULOS: But if some of your allies made it easier if you are handed some ammunition like ACORN, for example ‑‑
PRESIDENT OBAMA: Well, look. The ‑‑ you know, I think that are there folks in the Democratic camp or on the left who haven't, haven't always operated in ways that I'd appreciate? Absolutely.
STEPHANOPOULOS: Congress said they should cut off all funding for ACORN. Are you for that?
PRESIDENT OBAMA: Is that true on the other side as well? Of course that's true.
STEPHANOPOULOS: How about the funding for ACORN?
PRESIDENT OBAMA: Frankly it's not really something I followed closely. I didn't even know that ACORN was getting a whole lot of federal money.
STEPHANOPOULOS: But the Senate and the House have voted to cut it off.
PRESIDENT OBAMA: What I know is that what I saw on that video was certainly inappropriate and deserved to be ‑‑
STEPHANOPOULOS: So you are not committing the cutting off the federal funding?
PRESIDENT OBAMA: George, this is not the biggest issue facing the country. It's not something I'm paying a lot of attention to.
END
Info about ACORN and 2009 controversy (Wikipedia):
Founded in 1970, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) is a collection of community-based organizations in the United States that advocate for low- and moderate-income families by working on neighborhood safety, voter registration, health care, affordable housing, and other social issues. ACORN has over 400,000 members and more than 1,200 neighborhood chapters in over 100 cities across the U.S., as well as in Argentina, Canada, Mexico, and Peru.
On September 9, 2009, conservative activists Hannah Giles and James O'Keefe released a hidden-camera video in which they posed as a prostitute and a pimp in order to elicit a response from ACORN. In the edited video, two employees in ACORN's Baltimore office appear to offer unethical advice to the two regarding home loans, tax evasion, and disguising the identities of underaged sex workers trafficked from El Salvador. The two subjects were fired by ACORN after the video's release. Similar videos followed, filmed in Washington, D.C., Brooklyn (New York), San Diego, and San Bernardino, California.
An ACORN board member called the first video "false", "defamatory", an attempt at "gotcha journalism", and a violation of Maryland wiretap laws, saying that undercover teams had failed in similar attempts in at least five local offices in different states and demanding the unedited original video. ACORN stated that it is planning to sue the filmmakers, Breitbart.com which posted the videos, and Fox News, which repeatedly aired the footage. Scott Levenson, ACORN's spokesman, accused O'Keefe of dubbing the audio to fake the videos. Tresa Kaelke, one of the ACORN organizers interviewed, claimed that she did not take the two actors seriously, and made a variety of other absurd or joking statements in response to what she took as a gag.
Following the release of the Washington, D.C. and New York videos, the Senate passed amendments to pending bills to exclude ACORN from Housing and Urban Development and Interior Department funding. The House of Representatives subsequently voted an amendment that denies all federal funds to the group. New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo announced an investigation to ensure that state grants given to ACORN were properly spent on tax-preparation and loan-counseling services. Concurrently, New York City Council Speaker Christine C. Quinn suspended all ACORN grants sponsored by City Council members as Brooklyn District Attorney Charles Hynes conducted an investigation. On September 16, 2009, ACORN announced that they were suspending advising new clients and beginning an internal review process, stating that the conduct was "the indefensible action of a handful of our employees".
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