Obama and his ACORN partnership

John Fund made a number of interesting comments in the Wall Street Journal about ACORN and Obama's relationship with it. On the many Sunday news shows he appeared on, only one asked him about his connections with ACORN. Despite the scandals due to the video taping of many workers supporting illegal actions, he said

Frankly, it's not something I've followed closely.

Fund says that Obama and ACORN go back to 1991, when he took time off from his law career to operate a voter-registration drive for Project Vote, which was an ACORN partner and was later folded into ACORN. Obama's effort added 135,000 registered voters in Chicago and gave an upset victory to Democrat Carol Moseley Braun over the incumbent, Senator Alan Dixon in the 1992 Democrat primary.

Obama was recognized as a community organizer expert and became a favored trainer at ACORN's Chicago meetings. In 1995 he served as ACORN's lawyer and worked on a lawsuit to force Illinois to comply with the federal Motor Voter Law. ACORN later used that law's weak voter registration requirements to add huge numbers of fake names to the voter rolls. In 1996, Obama's listing of his supporters in the campaign for the Illinois Senate started with ACORN, though it was not an alphabetical list.