ACORN madness

I can't help but see the assault against ACORN as intellectually dishonest fear-mongering aimed at the growing sense of white victimhood that some Americans hold. ACORN is a group which focuses on registering voters of groups typically under represented at the polls- lower income and minority groups. They claim to have registered 1.3 million voters, 70% of which are minorties and and half of the under 30.

The recent GOP rhetoric against ACORN ("quasi-criminals) and its ties to obama are summarized in today's Washington Post article. ACORN's detractors accuse it of a "systematic effort to undermine the election process" due to factually reported instances of voters being registered more than one time and fake names being submitted for registration.

Matthew Yglesias has tracked the issue quite well and has provided some deconstruction of the GOP arguments. Some of the counterarguments:

-ACORN cannot throw away registration cards by law and regularly alerts registration administrators of suspect cards.
-Any significant operation that seeks to collect data is subject to occasional error, and discrediting these operations as fraudulent is dishonest; taken to its conclusion would necessarily censure any voter registration drives.
-In the end, there is very little evidence that significant voting fraud occurs (which requires more than just bad registration info to be submitted). If we are committed democrats who see voting as a right, the fact that more people can attend the polls would seem to outweigh the negligible, almost non-existent fraud at the polls.

In the end, it seems to me that the constituencies screaming about ACORN have been the ones historically aligned with poll taxes and other measures meant to systematically reduce vote participation among certain groups. Within segments of the GOP, the anti-ACORN speeches combined with people associating Obama with Muslims, terrorists and Rev. Wright, the worshipping of Palin as a hockey-mom "like us," the anti-immigrant fervor, and the Wall St. versus Main St. rhetoric all point towards fears that the Union is headed towards being led and supported by people who do not like the belong in a Norman Rockwell painting, and therefore must share antithetical values to ours.

I always thought that the beauty of America is that its heritage is founded on intellectual and moral values granting all men the rights"life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." What makes this country unique is its relative lack of dependence on a heritage of ethnicity, fatherland, and language. We are a project in universalism.

But I'll let Bill O'Reilly express the view that the white Christian male power structure is both core to us and threatened- he does it better than I can: