By most accounts, the Washington-based advocacy group Women’s Voices Women’s Vote is a stand-up organization, but in its lust to help Hillary Clinton it has run afoul of the law in a most foul way in yet another state. WVWV stands accused of waging a high-tech voter supression campaign in predominantly black, Barack Obama-leaning districts in North Carolina where residents have been receiving robocalls implying that they weren’t properly registered to vote in the May 6 Democratic primary.
The group has been caught red-handed, and WVWV president Page Gardner has apologized for any “confusion” caused by her group’s anonymous calls.
Ah yes, “confusion.” Kind of like the “confusion” that whites sewed in the Jim Crow South and other black voter suppression efforts since then.
Facing South reports that North Carolina is at least the fifth state where WVWV’s efforts have spurred investigations.
As has been her pattern, Hillary Clinton has not disavowed WVWV’s activities, although her North Carolina campaign chair did harrumph that they had no connection to the group. In fact, WVWV is chockablock with Clinton campaign ties.
No matter how deep the connections are, we certainly can’t say that Hillary approves of the group’s actions because we know that she has refused to stoop (cough) to negative campaigning (cough, cough), be it guilt by association, race baiting or outright character assassination. But this latest revelation certainly doesn’t burnish her already tarnished feminist credentials.
Hi Shaun - for the record, I wrote about this yesterday because I was a blogger who promo'd WVWV through it's Favorite Female Blogger thing - Digby ended up winning. She's written a bit about this scandal as well.
ReplyDeleteBooman Tribune says it well here, in regard to how I'm feeling and have been feeling since I heard about this. I'm sick about it for many, many reasons - if only because the perception of impropriety is out there, even if no intent or actual wrongdoing.
One thing I'm confused about though, and no one is being very helpful in answering: how does ACORN's effort to register voters through its GOTV efforts for Obama differ from WVWV?
Now - I know that WVWV is a 527, but I can't find the status for ACORN - I assume it's a 501 though, but not a PAC, but it could have a PAC - maybe it does - I don't know.
But anyway - do you have idea on this?
ACORN endorsed Obama and has worked to get people registered too. How do we or the law or both distinguish the efforts?
It is very very very muddy for me - this obviously just is not something I know a lot about.
Sorry - forgot the links:
ReplyDeleteBooman Tribune
Digby
Me
Hi Jill:
ReplyDeleteHere is my quick and dirty take:
WVWV has been caught red handed. Page Gardner shows her hand when she acknowledges that the calls and mailings took place well after the registration deadline. The kindest interpretation that I can put on her HuffPo piece is that she is willfully naïve and as such is unfit to lead WVWV.
I am unaware that ACORN has multiple ties to the Obama campaign as WVWV does to the Clinton campaign. I do know that ACORN has long had its own “integrity” issues, and to even suggest similarities between WVWV and ACORN does a disservice to the many women such as yourself who work so hard to involve women in the political process.
Finally, embrace competitions like Best Female Blogger or Best Blogger Anything your own risk. They’re bullsh*t exercises in back scratching and can bring more notoriety than fame because of unintended consequences like the WVWV scandal – and a scandal it is.
Hmm - that's interesting re: to suggest a similarity does a disservice to women who work hard to involve women in politics. I don't think I agree - but I have to think about this.
ReplyDeleteI agree about the risk - you are right on with that point. But it's not just with such promos, the risk is there anytime anyone chooses to support a group working for a cause or for a person.
For me, this situation has opened my eyes to many questions and not many answers.
What I'm most concerned about is well-stated in Booman Trib's post that I linked to - if people like me, really a pretty ordinary person, get scared off of supporting a cause that seems to be in line with what we support because we're expected to run every board member's name through the FEC before we say boo about the group, then who will get involved - who will take the risk?
THAT is the danger I see - oddly, the way in which people are going after groups that do things improperly because of voter suppression concerns may have the impact of suppressing voter involvement period - because it scares people off from aligning.
Maybe we should - I should - be more careful - but I already don't align with very many causes or people.
In a democracy, we want to foster trust, not teach people how to question it at every.single.turn.
I fear that we can stir up such cynicism everywhere and overstate the issue so much that we cause a reduction in activism.
How do we not do that, Shaun?
Ah yes, the trust thing.
ReplyDeleteMany people of my generation were driven away from politics by the disappointment of McCarthy being undercut by the Democratic machine in 1968, the McGovern debacle in 1972 and then Watergate.
It is not an exaggeration to say that by asking people to hope Obama also has asked them to trust. That is not the same as him being able to deliver on his mantra, but the unprecedented groundswell of support for him -- from a lot of folks of my generation and millions of people coming into the system for the first time -- only has one antecedent in my experience and that takes us back to McCarthy in '68.
People who engage in the process thinking that it is a tea party are willfully naive (there's that term again) and to turn off just because of one bad experience -- say Clinton steals the nomination from Obama -- would be extraordinarily unfortunate. There will be 2012, 2016, and so on.
If had to guess, bloggers as a whole have fostered more cynicism than trust and hope, and I sure am guilty of that. But, alas, it is the nature of the beast.