Posted on June 20, 2012 at 11:29 PM EST
By Aaron Klein
The socialist-leaning New Party had such a close relationship with the controversial ACORN that at one point the two shared an office address, fax lines, and e-mail addresses, WND has learned.
The New Party is coming under increased scrutiny after new information emerged further indicating President Obama was a member of the party in the 1990’s.
The New Party was a 1990s party that sought to elect members to public office with the aim of moving the Democratic Party far leftward to ultimately form a new political party with a socialist agenda.
In 2008, Barack Obama’s campaign denied the president was ever a member amid reports, including from WND, citing the New Party’s own literature listing Obama as a member.
Information uncovered in recent weeks, including Obama’s signed contract with the New Party, further establishes the president’s membership with the controversial organization.
Last week, WND reported how Obama traveled in the same political circles as the founders and early builders of the New Party.
‘ACORN Party’
It has long been known that ACORN helped form the backbone of the New Party.
Now WND has uncovered an even deeper relationship between the socialist-style party and the ACORN group that has long been close to Obama. The bonds were so tight that in progressive circles the New Party was largely considered the de facto political branch of ACORN.
The party itself was founded and led by ACORN activists.
For example, the New Party’s DC chapter, which called itself DC New Democracy, was run by organizer Doug Hess, whose full-time job at the time was a coordinator for ACORN.
Ted Thomas, Illinois ACORN president, served as the Chicago New Party chair, WND found.
A key New Party builder was Madeline Talbott, who served as national field director of ACORN.
Talbott is a former colleague of Obama’s from his 1990s Project Vote! Chicago Coalition, which worked directly with ACORN when Talbott was ACORN’s lead Illinois organizer. She has also written about working with Obama as a fellow Chicago community organizer in the 1990s.
Obama himself has linked his work on Project Vote to Talbott’s Illinois ACORN. When he sought the endorsement of ACORN for his 2008 presidential bid, Obama said, “When I ran Project Vote, the voter registration drive in Illinois, ACORN was smack dab in the middle of it.”
Similarly, ACORN was smack dab in the middle of the New Party.
When the New Party launched a Living Wage campaign, it was ACORN that truly spearheaded it.
Writing in the May 1999 edition of the American Spectator, Daniel McGroarty described the central role of ACORN in that campaign and in the New Party itself.
In an article entitled, “The Year of the Living Wage,” McGroarty related, “When the New Party needs to get the Living Wage job done, they look to an alliance forged with ACORN-the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now-the not-for-profit tenants’ rights and public housing activists.”
“So close is the connection that New Party literature sometimes describes ACORN as having ‘affiliated’ itself with the New Party.”
McGroarty noted that “indeed, in certain respects the two organizations seem to have morphed into a single entity: ACORN and the NP share an office address, fax lines, and e-mail addresses in New York, Boston, St. Paul, Little Rock, and Chicago.”
“Politically, the New Party-ACORN alliance has been an enormous success,” he added.
WND found that in her 2002 book, “The Tyranny of the Two-Party System,” political science professor Lisa Jane Disch posits the New Party would not have been able to have reached its registration quota without help from ACORN.
Contradicting recent claims by New Party founders that the party had no members, Disch reported the New Party had “chapters in eleven states, with a dues-paying membership of approximately ten thousand.”
Continued Disch: “The nascent party would never have made its signature quota without reinforcements from the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now… ACORN lent foot soldiers to the nominating effort together with much-needed tactical advice regarding how to persuade people to sign.”
Socialist goals
The New Party, established in 1992, took advantage of what was known as electoral “fusion,” which enabled candidates to run on two tickets simultaneously, attracting voters from both parties. But the New Party disbanded in 1998, one year after fusion was halted by the Supreme Court.
The socialist-oriented goals of the New Party were enumerated on its old website.
Among the New Party’s stated objectives were “full employment, a shorter work week and a guaranteed minimum income for all adults; a universal ‘social wage’ to include such basic benefits as health care, child care, vacation time and lifelong access to education and training; a systematic phase-in of comparable worth; and like programs to ensure gender equity.”
The New Party stated it also sought “the democratization of our banking and financial system – including popular election of those charged with public stewardship of our banking system, worker-owner control over their pension assets [and] community-controlled alternative financial institutions.”
Many of the New Party’s founding members were Democratic Socialists of America leaders and members of Committees of Correspondence, a breakaway of the Communist Party USA.
Last month, WND reported on a 1996 print advertisement in a local Chicago newspaper that shows Obama was the speaker at an event sponsored and presented by the Democratic Socialists of America, the DSA.
WND first reported on the event in 2010.
Obama listed as New Party member
In 2009, WND reported on newspaper evidence from the New Party’s own literature listing several new members of the New Party, including Obama.
Last week, Kurtz, writing at National Review Online, reported Obama signed a “contract” promising to publicly support and associate himself with the New Party while in office.
In 2008, Obama’s Fight the Smears campaign website quoted Carol Harwell, who managed Obama’s 1996 campaign for the Illinois Senate, as stating: “Barack did not solicit or seek the New Party endorsement for state senator in 1995.”
Fight the Smears conceded the New Party did support Obama in 1996 but denied that Obama had ever joined.
With research by Brenda J. Elliott
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