There once was a time when the McCain campaign and its Republican allies insisted on a daily basis that the greatest danger to this nation was al Qaeda. But now, apparently, they think it’s ACORN.

My email in-box runneth over. Here’s a weekend sampling of the message headlines from the McCain and Republican camps: “Conference call on Barack Obama’s Ties to ACORN.” “ACORN Dropped Thousands of Bad Registrations.” “State GOP Leaders Accuse ACORN of Vote Fraud” “State of Indiana Seeks Voter Fraud Probe” “FBI Looking Into Suspect New Mexico Voter Registrations” “On Obama, ACORN, and Voter Registrations” “ACORN Vote Fraud Witness in Ohio”...

…And any second, I was expecting to receive a statement from John McCain, vowing to pursue ACORN to the gates of hell.

Two thoughts: (1) It is absolutely beyond dispute that some canvassers employed by ACORN – that’s the left-leaning Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now – have filed phony voter registration cards in key states such as Nevada and Missouri, and that ACORN at times has suffered from a lack of quality control, and (2) It is absolutely preposterous to think that McCain, in his growing desperation, can gain any serious traction in this presidential campaign by linking Obama to ACORN, or by painting ACORN as a clear and present danger to the republic.

Indeed, the sudden focus on ACORN is proof that the Republicans are running low on effective weaponry. They have lost control of the overarching campaign narrative; as the newly-released ABC News-Washington Post poll again demonstrates, Obama is widely viewed as more credible on the number-one issue, the economic crisis. That’s no surprise, given the McCain camp’s mixed messages. Yesterday, McCain insider Lindsey Graham told CBS News that McCain this week would unveil “a very comprehensive approach to jump start the economy” – only to be contradicted later by a McCain spokesman who said, “We do not have any immediate plans to announce any policy proposals.” Meanwhile, the McCain camp isn’t even in sync with its allies; on ABC News yesterday, McCain’s proposal to have the U.S. Treasury buy up troubled mortgages was assailed as an unfair burden on taxpayers…by Roy Blunt, the number-two House Republican leader.

So McCain, increasingly bereft of effective weaponry, is apparently reduced to throwing sticks, stones, and tufts of grass. On the potency scale, ACORN ranks somewhere between sticks and tufts.

ACORN, during its 38-year history, has long rankled the Republicans, and no doubt the base voters are still sufficiently inflamed to denounce the group at McCain-Palin rallies. But to prevail on election day, McCain needs to capture most of the undecided voters, along with a healthy share of those now leaning towards Obama. Demonizing ACORN - and seeking to link Obama to a group that relatively few people have even heard of - simply won’t do the trick.

For starters – and I know this will shock you – the McCain people can’t even get their facts straight. In a Friday conference call, McCain campaign manager Rick Davis said that Obama, as an attorney, once represented ACORN in a lawsuit “against the state of Illinois and the federal government.” (Thereby implying, of course, that Obama was in cahoots with anti-government law-breakers.) But Davis’ dark fantasies collide with factual reality. Obama did indeed represent ACORN in a lawsuit, back in 1995 – working on the same side as the federal government. ACORN and the feds, along with radical plaintiffs such as the League of Women Voters, went to court to compel the state of Illinois to implement a new “motor voter” law that was designed to make it easier for citizens to enroll as voters.  They won.

Davis also noted that the Obama camp paid $800,000 last February to a consulting firm affiliated with ACORN, and that the Obama camp didn’t tell the Federal Election Commission, until it filed an amended report in August, that the money was intended for get-out-the-vote drives. But the FEC says that amended filings happen all the time, and ACORN says that only 10 percent of the Obama payment wound up in the ACORN coffers. Meanwhile, the McCain camp, still working the Obama link, pointed out that Obama had once done training sessions for ACORN workers. It turned out that his total time as a trainer was two hours.

ACORN is hardly pure as the driven snow. Canvassers in some locales have been kicked out for filing phony voter registration cards; some have been prosecuted. ACORN says it has fired 80 New Mexico canvassers since last December, for submitting potentially fraudulent registrations. ACORN humorists in Nevada reportedly have been caught filing multiple voter registration cards carrying the names of football stars Terrell Owens and Tony Romo. ACORN has acknowledged those incidents; the Nevada chapter says in a statement, “While the vast majority of our voter registration canvassers do a great job, there have been several times over the past 10 months that our Las Vegas Quality Control program has identified a canvasser who appears to have knowingly submitted a fake or duplicate application in order to pad his or her hours.”

The problem for the McCain people, however, is that they have oversold their case. What they are calling “voter fraud” is actually “voter registration fraud,” which is very different. The latter is much easier to accomplish than the former. Even if state election officials fail to screen out all the phony voter registrants (and apparently their screening processes are quite good), people typically don’t show up at the polls with phony identification, seeking to cast bogus ballots. Are we to believe that thousands of Nevadans will show up claiming that they are Terrell Owens? As election-law specialist Rick Hasen of Loyola University reportedly said the other day, “these claims of voter impersonation fraud are just not credible.” Indeed, in a 2005 study of recent Ohio elections co-sponsored by the League of Women Voters, a grand total of four fradulent ballots were unearthed...out of nine million ballots cast in 2002 and 2004.
 
Savvy Republicans recognize that, as a campaign strategy, the ACORN story will get them nowhere. But something else is going on here. By targeting ACORN (and, by implication, all the Obama-friendly voter registration drives), the McCain camp is trying to pre-spin a November defeat, by framing in advance the argument that an Obama victory would be illegitimate. It’s like that famous scene in Citizen Kane, when the headline writers at Kane’s sycophantic newspaper prepared two announcements for election day. If the boss won his gubernatorial race, the headline would be, “Kane Elected!” If he lost, the headline would be, “Fraud at Polls!”

Which is why Obama can ill afford to win narrowly. Only a decisive victory would render the “fraud” argument moot, and send McCain’s assembled team of litigators back to their law firms.

And one last observation: ACORN is involved in all kinds of issues, including immigration reform. For instance, ACORN sponsored a big community meeting on immigration reform back on Feb. 20, 2006, at a college in Miami. Care to guess who validated ACORN by showing up to speak at its event?

John McCain.