Not since the princess kissed the frog has there been such an image as the photograph that ran on the front page of last week’s number of the Brooklyn Paper. Under a six-column headline “Sealed With a Kiss,” it carries a photograph of Mayor Bloomberg in a liplock with Bertha Lewis, doyenne of the New York branch of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, as the two announce a plan to devote half of a new development to nonmarket-rate housing.

Well, it’s heartwarming, but we have our doubts about how this fairy tale is going to come out. Mr. Bloomberg, in the midst of his busy mayoral schedule, seems to have failed to consider the background of the people with whom he was making nice.

ACORN was born in the 1970s of the National Welfare Rights Organization, whose founder, George Wiley, launched a campaign to flood welfare rolls in an attempt to overload the system and exploit the ensuing crisis to usher in a socialist program. When the crisis didn’t come, he turned his attention to “community organizing.” ACORN was the result.

The group’s manifesto, called the “People’s Platform,” includes such demands as requiring large companies that desire to leave the community to “obtain an exit visa from the community board, signifying that the company has adequately compensated all its employees and the community at large for losses due to relocation.”

The “achievement” that landed Ms. Lewis in the papers most recently is another example of her group’s anti-free-market tendencies. According to Joseph DePlasco, a spokesman for Atlantic Yards developer Forest City Ratner, Ms. Lewis and ACORN were instrumental in negotiating a significant increase in the number of units at the site that will be deemed “affordable housing,” to 50% from the 20% that’s standard for other housing developments.

New York’s housing market certainly needs many things, but an extra 2,250 units of market-distorting, dependence-inducing housing on a prime spot in the heart of Brooklyn isn’t on the list. Would Bruce Ratner or Mr. Bloomberg like to turn over 50% of their own residential blocks to “affordable” housing?

ACORN manages to find ways to exploit taxpayer money for its agenda. For example, there are the “community schools” ACORN has organized under the aegis of the city’s Department of Education. In return for its expenditure, the city gets institutions such as the ACORN High School for Social Justice, in Brooklyn, and the Bread and Roses High School. The latter, Sol Stern reported in the Spring 2003 City Journal, has gone so far as busing students to Washington to protest tax cuts.

These schools were up and running even as Ms. Lewis fought a bitter battle against Mayor Giuliani when, in 2001, he tried to let for-profit Edison Schools Incorporated take over five failing public schools. ACORN members made headlines in 1995 for interrupting Newt Gingrich in mid-speech to protest his plans to “cut” the school lunch program by increasing it by 4.5% a year.

ACORN’s machinations extend into the political sphere too, especially in New York, where it has close ties to the Working Families party. Ms. Lewis serves as a party co-chair in addition to her job at ACORN. The party counts the minimum wage increase enacted in December 2004 as one of its greatest legislative achievements and now devotes its energies to pushing for a return to rent-control, public financing of political campaigns, and reinstatement of the stock-transfer tax, all in an effort to advance its belief that a “healthy, vibrant public sector is sound public policy.”

Of course, it is possible Mr. Bloomberg knew all this perfectly well before he smooched with Ms. Lewis. Presumably, he’s aware that her Working Families Party controls a precious ballot line in the upcoming mayoral election. He might recall that Ms. Lewis accused his administration of “educational racism” during a fight over school staffing issues in 2003.

Maybe the mayor was hoping that if he kissed Ms. Lewis, she would, like the proverbial frog, turn into a prince. Or maybe she was hoping the billionaire Republican was the frog and that he’d turn into a prince. To them both, one can but say that government is not a fairy tale.