Burying an ACORN

Opinion: March 29, 2010 at 12:00a.m.

Burying an ACORN

Los Angeles Times: Liberals still don’t buy the Bush administration’s explanation for the Abu Ghraib scandal — that the humiliation and torture of prisoners at the Iraq facility was the work of a handful of misguided U.S. troops, not the result of a culture and policies put in place by those higher up the chain of command. Yet many seem willing to accept a strikingly similar defense by leaders of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now following an attack by the right.

After a lame attempt at damage control, ACORN announced Monday that it was disbanding. That’s bad news in the short run for those whose homes and schools it has saved, but in the long run the surviving splinter organizations could emerge stronger than ever — if they learn from the mistakes made by ACORN’s leaders.

ACORN was never the evil liberal cabal that fired the imaginations of conservatives and inspired vicious attacks in right-wing media outlets. Yet ACORN’s management problems were clear long before last summer, when a pair of conservative activists posing as a prostitute and her boyfriend secretly videotaped ACORN employees at several offices around the country giving them outrageous tax and housing advice.

The wise thing to do in the aftermath of the videos would have been to acknowledge these failings, apologize and clean house, with resignations or firings at the management level. ACORN is vanishing, but many of the state and local organizations affiliated with it will survive. If they want to grow from a tainted seed into something greater, they need to change more than their names.