In 2005, I met Maxine Nelson, a Pine Bluff registered nurse and grandmother of 17.  She and I were at a banquet sharing a community award.  Since 1986 Maxine has been an advocate for neighborhood concerns in her hometown.  If there is trouble with trash pickup, she knows who to go to.  If there is a vacant lot with knee-high grass or an abandoned house suffering from vandalism or drug deals, she brings those issues to the attention of the people who can clean up those problems.  She has a passion for increasing the minimum wage, and she helped Pine Bluff pass a living wage for city workers and others receiving city favors.  She helped get bus service for employees of nursing homes and for Tyson workers at an industrial park.  She is a vibrant senior who is giving herself to the improvement of her community.  She’s just the kind of grandmother you wish we had more of.  In Pine Bluff, Maxine Nelson found that ACORN was the catalyst for the kind of hopeful changes she wants to work for.

Last week in one of his ads, Senator John McCain alleged that ACORN may be “destroying the fabric of democracy.”  What I know of ACORN speaks just the opposite. 

ACORN began in Little Rock in 1970 as the Arkansas Community Organizations for Reform Now.  Their first agenda was free school lunches for schoolchildren, concerns on behalf of unemployed workers’, advocacy for Vietnam Veterans’ rights, and improved hospital emergency room care.  In 1971 ACORN organized a “Save the City” campaign in Little Rock especially to address blue-collar homeowners’ concerns for traffic problems in the Centennial section and to confront unscrupulous blockbusting in Oak Forest.  Later when Arkansas Power & Light planned to build a plant that would harm farmers’ fields with sulphur emissions, ACORN stepped up for the farmers.  When a Harvard-financed study proved the allegations of harm, AP&L cut the plant’s size in half.

ACORN has grown and now is organized in most states.  The original “A” that stood for Arkansas is now “Association” of Community Organizations for Reform Now.  It remains primarily a neighborhood-oriented organization driven by the interests of it members, mostly low to moderate income families.  Local chapters meet, look at problems of concern to their community, and prioritize to plan how best to address and solve the problems.

In Pine Bluff, for instance, Maxine’s group offers classes and personal counseling to help neighbors create budgets, reduce debt, establish savings and create a good credit report.  Those who succeed in going through their process then go to Simmons Bank for evaluation for an affordable loan at market rate.  These are FHA, VA or low-cost conventional loan.  No sub-prime loans for them.  ACORN-coached loans to low or moderate income borrowers have consistently had lower default rates than national averages.

ACORN is working to halt predatory lending.  They tried to prevent the kind of loose regulations that have led to the recent credit and housing bust.  Their current national priority is to work to guarantee every American access to health care. 

ACORN has also promoted voter registration and encouraged voter participation in elections.  That’s where the current controversy arose.  In a few places, ACORN hired people to help register voters, paying $8 an hour.  Some of the people they hired cheated ACORN.  Instead of registering real unregistered voters, they turned in fictional or false names.  They weren’t plotting election fraud, they were trying to get paid by ACORN for not working.  Only a very few of the 13,000 paid canvassers turned in any faked forms.  

In nine of the eleven states where questions have come up, only election officials can reject a false form.  By law every voter registration form must be submitted, regardless of doubts about its authenticity.  So when some clown or lazy worker registered Mickey Mouse in Florida, ACORN had to turn it in or face a $1,000 fine.  Mickey Mouse won’t show up to try to vote and wouldn’t be accepted at a polling place without appropriate identification.  ACORN tries to red-flag any suspicious registrations, but it appears they did a poor job of that in Tacoma, Washington. 

For people like Maxine Nelson who has spent over twenty years improving the lives of low and moderate income citizens in Pine Bluff, the attacks on ACORN feel personal and demeaning.  “Whatever we’ve done, we’ve tried to help people,” she told me last week.  I like Maxine and I like ACORN.  I don’t want them falsely sensationalized in campaign rhetoric.

As we get into the end of the campaign cycle, we may hear more false attacks from both sides.  I go to www.factcheck.org pretty regularly to get a non-partisan evaluation of the political messages.  When I last looked, there were ten home page-stories on false facts -- five on Republicans, two on Democrats, three on both.  Sadly, the page changes by the hour.