ACORN’s many problems have been well known for quite a while, at least to anyone venturing beyond network newscasts and liberal blogs. As an organization, ACORN doesn’t just limit itself to churning out forged voter registrations. It’s a full-blown racketeering enterprise worthy of The Sopranos, and it finances its operations with the help of taxpayer money.

So how could the major media fail to hold ACORN to account all these years?

I have my pet theory.

Political correctness has been slowly rotting the establishment media to its core, to the point where few professional journalists would dare launch a serious investigation into the exalted Association of Community Organizers for Reform Now. Why? Simple: according to the tenets of political correctness, the racial makeup of the communities being “organized” automatically confers the presumption of moral superiority upon ACORN. So all those nasty rumors about ACORN must be no more than lies spread by racist propagandists.

To understand the mindset of the politically correct, there are a few rules of racial relations that you need to know. These rules establish the Hierarchy of Multiculturalism:

1. If a person is a member of a group guilty of past racial oppression, that person has no moral standing in relation to anyone in any group that’s ever been a victim of that oppression.
2. A member of an oppressor group is always assumed to be guilty in relation to a member of a victim group.
3. An oppressor can only avoid presumed guilt by making a display of his or her sympathy for the oppressed.
4. Members of victim groups can lose their moral standing by expressing a preference for individual rights as opposed to group rights.
5. Advocating on behalf of a victim makes one almost as unassailable as being that victim.
6. Coming to the defense of an oppressor is even more repugnant than being that oppressor.

This thinking is so common these days that many prominent liberals–from New York Times columnists to former presidents–believe that criticism of President Obama can only be motivated by racial bigotry.

That’s because people at a lower rung of the Multicultural Hierarchy are never allowed to challenge those above them. The purpose of this is to quell criticism and enforce thought conformity. Why break the rules and risk being thought of as a bigot?

Media coverage of Kanye West’s latest outburst at the MTV Video Music Awards illustrates this. Imagine the racial roles reversed:

It’s the Country Music Awards. A black female performer is accepting her first-ever award. She’s happy and a bit surprised; her style of music doesn’t usually win Country Music Awards. Halfway through her emotional acceptance speech, a white male country music singer runs up on stage, grabs the microphone from her, and announces that another woman should have won, a white woman–a “real” country singer–instead of the underdog black woman.

I’d bet my life savings that the reporting would be quite different than what happened in Kanye’s case. Sure, he was roundly criticized in the media, but we’re in an age when hidden motivations are attributed to every interracial interaction, so it’s interesting that few dared to discuss a racial angle to the Kanye West/Taylor Swift confrontation.

There’s a simple explanation. By the rules of the Hierarchy of Multiculturalism, when a member of a victim group is the actual victim in a real-world encounter, it’s an example of oppression. But when an oppressor becomes a victim in real life, that’s just karma, man. Any possible racial angle becomes irrelevant.

So forgive me if I don’t believe that the abundantly Caucasian and overwhelmingly liberal journalist class is capable of taking on a target like ACORN, no matter how apparent the criminality might be.

In the end, though, it doesn’t matter. The work of Giles and O’Keefe highlights the diminishing relevance of the establishment media. Despite the story getting no coverage on broadcast TV or in any major newspaper, it propagated online, then to talk radio and Fox News. And before any “mainstream” media outlet covered it, the political pressure grew to the point that the Census Bureau cut all ties to ACORN, and U.S. Senate voted by the overwhelming margin of 83-7 to cut off the group’s federal funding.

Even after these events, a vast majority of the media ignored the story. And yet the public kept getting the truth, which only made the media appear to be in the business of hiding news rather than reporting it. Realizing that this is not a winning business model for an ailing industry, a few of the more independent-minded reporters started covering the story, and now the White House Press Secretary is busy deflecting questions about the president’s former colleagues and fellow community organizers at ACORN. Despite the media’s best efforts.

James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles represent another massive power-shift in the age of Internet media. The first occurred when the Drudge Report broke Monica Lewinsky’s affair with President Clinton, a story that Newsweek got first but declined to run. The second was when CBS News got hoodwinked by documents that purported to impugn President Bush. After bloggers exposed them as forgeries, the documents ended up tarnishing CBS News instead. Long-time anchor Dan Rather was forced to retire in disgrace.

This is another huge embarrassment for Big Media–not so much because they look foolish, but because they’re beginning to look irrelevant.

One possible answer, for you cynics out there (and I may be one), is that he has zero leadership experience and this is simply his way of voting “present” one more time. But that’s too easy and too amateurish for someone so politically savvy.

The only logical answer is he doesn’t want to be pinned down on any specifics.  Sure, he’s talked about what he’d like in a bill, but he’s pretty much disavowed everything he’s said he supports too. He wants a public option one day, but doesn’t need one the next, then explains how it is vital to “real reform.” It literally can’t be both but that hasn’t stopped him from having it both ways.

So at this point, whenever anyone criticizes Obamacare the White House has the perfect defense, “There is no bill.” You can’t win a shadow boxing match, you can’t pick a lock with mashed potatoes, and you can’t pin any unpopular proposals on the President.

This works very well in a campaign because it frustrates your opponent and leaves the public to judge you based mainly on your personality, not your policies.  But it’s about as effective a way to lead a nation as would be hiring Kanye West to be pointman for rehabbing your public image.

In 2003, I spent a lot of time fighting the proposed Medicare prescription drug entitlement because it was simply rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic without addressing the iceberg ahead.  Back then, President Bush outlined the reforms he wished to see in Medicare in order to incorporate a prescription drug benefit.  Those reforms were good, and crucial to the fiscal health, not only of Medicare but of the country as a whole. But all he did was introduce general principles, not a specific plan; he left the details to Congress.  They ended up slapping a massive unfunded entitlement on top of an even more massive unfunded entitlement, patted themselves on the back for being so compassionate and sat back down in their deck chairs while speeding ever faster into the northern Atlantic.  President Obama is leading us down the same path.

Real leadership risks unpopularity for righteousness.  It was just as bad when President Bush left the wheel for Congressional Republicans to steer as it is for President Obama to hand it to those in his own party.

The American people do not want what Democratic leaders are pushing, but they’ve demonstrated a tin-ear to public opinion, opting for ideology over their duty.  This is where strong leadership can play a role.

No one disputes there is room for reform in our health care system; nothing involving human beings is perfect.  But by refusing to take a true leadership role, President Obama has allowed the extreme partisans to take over, and he leaves us now with talk of ramming a bill through the Senate by utilizing a budgetary trick called “reconciliation.”

With all the claims of a desire for bi-partisanship, the President doesn’t seem very “bi” curious.  Lip-service paid to reform ideas important to conservatives are discarded faster than a wet Kleenex during cold season.  If the President isn’t willing to step-up and lead by including real reform ideas important to the Right, like tort reform and allowing the purchase of insurance across state lines, we’re going to end up with a partisan bill that may or may not pass the House, that will need to be rammed through the Senate and will have to be signed by Obama because he’s put all his chips on double zero and a loss would make him less relevant faster than just about any President in history.

All is not lost; not yet anyway. Since he has been so nebulous about his “plan,” he still has time to cobble together a bill that lowers costs and allows more people to obtain coverage without harming the vast majority of Americans that have coverage.  But there is nothing in his past or his present that would lead anyone to think he has the spine to do it.

Republicans, for their part, shouldn’t be looking to reinvent the wheel here.  Simple reforms, in the form of a simple bill, could be the PR coup they need.  Real, simple reform needs to contain the following:

• Tort reform to make it cheaper to be a doctor will make medical care less expensive;
• the ability to buy plans across state lines will allow victims of a state like New Jersey to escape expensive plans due to excessive mandates;
• the ability of like businesses and individuals through civic organizations to band together to have more buying power, therefore obtain lower premiums;
• changing the tax code to treat the individual market the same as the employer provided one;
• refundable and advanceable tax credits for those that explicitly demonstrate need.

Only one of those reform proposals cost money, and only a little.  While in a perfect world the government would stay out of the health insurance game, we don’t live in a perfect world.  With Presidential leadership these minor tweaks could make a huge difference to all Americans without a massive infringement or take-over of a 1/7 of our economy.  That’s assuming making heath insurance is more widely available and more affordable is the real goal, but that’s a question for another day…