The Cleveland Leader has a series of posts tracking the Obama campaign’s lies and evasions about the candidate’s long history of connections with ACORN, and their attempts to quietly edit the Obama website as more information leaks out: Obama Campaign Involved in More Cover-Ups in ACORN Scandal.

wikileaks.org has an article from the Winter 2003 edition of the magazine Social Policy (the full article is here, but requires registration), making it very clear that Barack Obama’s ties to ACORN are extensive.

(Here’s our local copy of the PDF file.)

[Photo caption: “ACORN members meet with Illinois Senate candidate Barack Obama. Photo courtesy Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now.”]

Obama started building the base years before. For instance, ACORN noticed him when he was organizing on the far south side of the city with the Developing Communities Project. He was a very good organizer. When he returned from law school, we asked him to help us with a lawsuit to challenge the state of Illinois’ refusal to abide by the National Voting Rights Act, also known as motor voter. Allied only with the state of Mississippi, Illinois had been refusing to allow mass-based voter registration according to the new law. Obama took the case, known as ACORN vs. Edgar (the name of the Republican governor at the time) and we won. Obama then went on to run a voter registration project with Project VOTE in 1992 that made it possible for Carol Moseley Braun to win the Senate that year. Project VOTE delivered 50,000 newly registered voters in that campaign (ACORN delivered about 5000 of them).

Since then, we have invited Obama to our leadership training sessions to run the session on power every year, and, as a result, many of our newly developing leaders got to know him before he ever ran for office. Thus it was natural for many of us to be active volunteers in his first campaign for STate Senate and then his failed bid for U.S. Congress in 1996. By the time he ran for U.S. Senate, we were old friends.