Bushwhacked_ Life in George W. Bush's America Large Print - Molly Ivins [79]
IF THERE ARE cold hearts in the White House, at least there are heroes in one of the country’s most durable community organizations. In her quirky mix of Spanish and English, Cruz said she was hanging her hopes on a grassroots group known by its odd arboreal acronym. “ACORN tuve an action,” Cruz said. The leaders and members of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now are perennial trench fighters for economic justice in the nation’s cities. The “action” Cruz referred to was a protest in Philadelphia. But ACORN’s work extended beyond Philadelphia. During the big freeze of 2003, ACORN members and organizers seemed to be everywhere, or at least everywhere the poor were caught between the harsh realities of an arctic cold spell and George Bush’s budget. Among its more creative efforts were takeovers of Republican Party headquarters.
In Chicago, for example, fifty ACORN families moved into the party offices, over the objection of the party’s employees. They found their way to the databases and faxed and phoned Washington. They advised the White House switchboard that ACORN had taken over the Republican Party of Illinois and would give it back when President Bush released the emergency LIHEAP funds. Their timing was driven by more than cold weather. They moved into the offices the night before the president was to arrive in Chicago to lay out his budget: the budget that cut $300 million in LIHEAP funding. And to make the case for eliminating the taxes investors pay on stock dividends.
As Dubya Bush’s advance team checked into their hotel, ACORN squatters were checking into the Republican Party office. “This place is warmer than most people’s homes,” said a man sitting on the floor. WGN-TV put the claim to the test, dispatching reporter Juan Carlos Fanjul to the living room of eighty-one-year-old Doris Rodgers, one of the people occupying Republican Party headquarters. The temperature on Fanjul’s digital thermometer read 32 degrees F. The cops decided to arrest two elderly women. Eighty-one-year-old Mahaley Somerville and sixty-nine-year-old Gwendolyn Stewart were “cuffed and stuffed” into a patrol car in front of the party offices. “It’s warm in jail,” said Somerville as they hauled her away. “It’s cold in my house.”
TV news is done by formula. Every newscast began with a variation on “When President Bush arrives in Chicago tomorrow, he’ll find that for some people it’s just as cold inside their homes as it is on the city’s streets . . .” Most stories went on to describe conditions facing fourteen thousand households without heat. WGN even sent a reporter into the Cook County Jail to ask Somerville what she would like to say to the president.
ACORN was equally imaginative in Rhode Island, where forty-five poor, urban protestors confronted Republican state party chair Bradford Gorham in the law offices of Gorham & Gorham. (Why do these folks always have names that sound like the Mayflower passenger manifest?) “I still don’t know why they were here,” Gorham told a reporter from The Providence Journal. “I kept asking the chief fellow, and he kept saying, ‘I’m cold, it’s warm in here.’
“It disrupted the place. . . . I mean people were shouting at the top of their lungs. They filled the whole downstairs of the office building. They were leaning against the fax machine, leaning against the printers and the computers. After that, one guy got very insulting. I said, ‘Would you please leave,’ and he just stood there looking stupid.”
Gorham said the demonstrators had “sleeping bags and things like that. They were ready to camp out there on the floor. I said, ‘Oh, Lord, I’ve got a sit-in demonstration.’ And after the police came, they left.”
When a reporter asked Gorham if the protesters had a point about Bush’s budget cuts, Gorham said he wasn’t sure. Then he wavered: “Nobody wants to see people cold or hungry