Did ACORN Steal the 2008 Presidential Election

The GOP should take a good, long look in the mirror when evaluating what went wrong in 2008

November 19, 2009

A recent poll suggests a majority of Republican voters believe that Barack Obama did not legitimately win last November's presidential election due to acts of mass voter fraud committed by ACORN. While I believe ACORN is a criminal organization that must be dealt with, Republicans should take a good look in the mirror because even without ACORN's vote fraud efforts, Obama would almost certainly still have won the election, for reasons I will explain below...

I think Obama would probably have won anyway, but if the Republicans had put forth a more appealing candidate with a halfway competent campaign team that actually ran a competitive campaign --- in a close election ACORN's impact definitely could have altered the outcome. Meg Whitman was the McCain campaign's national co-chairman for God's sake. Anyone that had the misfortune of having to deal with Ebay's customer service back when Whitman was CEO would understand that this is not the person one would want running an operation and strategizing on how to connect with average, every day people (i.e. voters). The entire McCain campaign was amateurish and tactically inept. Throw in that the candidate himself was about as appealing to the base as a two week old refrigerated hot dog with a little bit of mold growing on the bun --- the point is that Republicans would be making a big mistake by writing off this loss to ACORN and in doing so avoiding looking in the mirror and evaluating what we ourselves could have done better.

ACORN is a criminal organization that is threatening the integrity of the republic and our system of voting. ACORN must be dealt with. These points are not debatable. ACORN will contaminate our electoral process if the organization is not dismantled and the offenders prosecuted. That said, even without ACORN I think the results in 2008 would have been nearly identical for the reasons outlined above, as well as the obvious (Bush's unpopularity, Obama's having no record to criticize, etc.). We had a bad candidate, a Vice President who is talented and has a lot of potential but who clearly was not prepared for the task, as evidenced by the fact that a b-list reported (Katie Courig) pretty much single-handedly destroyed whatever momentum she had brought to the campaign upon being named to the ticket.

If you compare that to the way Dick Cheney or Ronald Reagan would routinely go over the heads of reporters and make it look easy, it's clear that she just wasn't ready. The most damning part of it all is that Courig really doesn't strike me as being anything more than of average intelligence. If a woman of Courig's intellect can harm her that badly, it's easy to see why the McCain camp "bottled her up", as she now claims in her book.

She's not necessarily a bad candidate for down the road, but most NFL players are better skilled at dealing with reporters than she was. She was a disaster waiting to happen, and it did happen. Talk shows were filled with callers claiming they were "sitting out" this election to protest the GOP for it's heavy spending between 2004-2006, as well as for failing to field a legitimate contender.

If all our internal problems aren't fixed, ACORN being shut down completely will still leave us with 1.5 political parties (Democrats and Democrats Light) and millions of voters who stop caring out of frustration.

All that said, I totally agree that ACORN needs to go and people from that organization need to do time in order for justice to be served.

I would be much more inclined to believe that ACORN changed the outcome of NY-23 than the presidential election this past November.

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Tags: ACORN, Corruption, Democrats, GOP, Government, Obama