What are these principles? 
Let’s get that one straight, for starters.  Congress
shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the
free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or
the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the
Government for a redress of grievances.

Whether you are a member of the National Rifle Association
or Mothers Against Drunk Driving, you are enjoying First Amendment protections
of the right to assemble.  This right is
only meaningful if individuals are at liberty to organize like-minded citizens. 
The assault on this principle, via attacks on ACORN and EFCA, is what
alarms us.

The Employee Free Choice Act seeks to protect workers’
rights to associate and form unions. 
This right, we might think, is already protected under US law.  The need for EFCA emerges, to put it briefly,
from the systematic failure of our National Labor Relations Board to
effectively guarantee this right.  For
more on that subject, excellent summaries have been produced by our allies at
American Rights at Work.

Why should so many of the current crop of Republican
candidates oppose a proposal to protect the right of workers to organize?  And why are they equally threatened by ACORN?

For those who never heard of ACORN before the recent Republican attacks, these
are in fact your grandmother’s neighborhood organizers.  ACORN is a nonprofit grassroots organization that
has been organizing low-income people throughout the United States for the past forty
years.  Its stated mission is to “help
neighbors together to work for stronger, safer and more just communities.”  What’s wrong with that?

John McCain commented yesterday in an interview on CNBC that
he is firmly opposed to EFCA.  He has
stated that ACORN is a threat to “democracy” – loosely defined, we take
it.  In both stances, he comes down
firmly on the side of employers, who want to limit the power of workers to
associate in the workplace, and are the principal reason, over the years, for
the evisceration of the NLRA.  The
opposition of some Republican leaders to ACORN smacks of the same elitism,
favoring the rights of those who are already influential- employers, landlords
– and seeking to strictly circumscribe the ability of those who would seek to
organize and demand workplace, community or property rights in the face of
these elite interests.

This, we presume, is also what Governor Palin means when she
addresses her audiences as constituting the “real America.”  It is a view of America that is deeply and
fundamentally at odds with the basic principles of citizen involvement that
sustain our democracy.  It is a view that
is fundamentally elitist and moves us toward oligopoly rather than nurturing
democratic process.  It curtails space
for the millions of real Americans who do not control resources but seek
nonetheless to enjoy a political voice. 
Palin might enjoy meeting some of the folks that do the day-to-day
grassroots work of sustaining and practicing our First Amendment rights.  We invite true patriots everywhere to stand
up for communities and unions, and invite political candidates of all
convictions on a tour sometime of the Real America in which we all work.