October 31, 1996

The Mother Jones Poll

There were 610 respondents to last week’s poll. Here’s what they had to say. Be sure to check out the <a href="/news/feature/1996/10/poll_archive.html">results</a> of our previous polls.

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The MoJo Wire invites you to jump on the Soapbox one last time and express your opinions during this campaign season. This week, imagine that you’ve just been elected president after a long and arduous campaign. What will your first moves be?

1. Pick your cabinet:

a. Defense Secretary:

41.31% Colin Powell

16.07% Jerry Brown

12.13% Ted Kaczynski

8.36% Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.)

7.71% None

6.23% Barry White

3.77% Bob Dornan (R-Calif.)

3.44% Arthur Kent (NBC’s Scud Stud)

.98% Sen. Jesse Helms (R-NC)

b. Education Secretary:

30.82% Mr. Wizard

15.57% Toni Morrison

11.64% None

10.98% Candace Gingrich

10.49% Lani Guinier

9.67% Dan Quayle

6.56% Allan Bloom

2.79% Bob Dole

1.48% Pat Robertson

c. Press Secretary:

32.46% Noam Chomsky

15.90% John McLaughlin

14.92% Rush Limbaugh

13.44% Mark Shields

12.46% Don King

10.82% None

d. Drug Czar:

29.18% Joycelyn Elders

15.90% C. Everett Koop

13.93% David Crosby

10.66% Kelsey Grammer

10.66% Joe Camel

8.85% None

6.39% Nancy Reagan

4.43% Pete Coors (CEO, Coors)

e. FBI Director:

24.43% George Mitchell (D-Maine)

22.46% Ru Paul

17.54% G. Gordon Liddy

13.12% None

11.80% Marcia Clark

7.05% Mark Fuhrman

3.61% Craig Livingstone

2. You’ve got this BIG budget deficit, and (silly) you promised a middle-class tax cut during your campaign. What program will you cut first (or “decrease growth”) in order to get the budget balanced?

59.67% Defense

11.15% Medicare/Medicaid

10.33% Social Security

8.36% Education

7.70% Environment

2.79% None

3. You get a lot of squeaking from lobbyists from Investment firms that Social Security should be “privatized.” What do you do?

50.16% Work for the privatization of SS

46.89% Work against the privatization of SS

2.95% None

4. Okay, so you served one term and were, uh, unelected. Now you’re faced with planning for your retirement. Social Security has been privatized, so you get the cash in hand every month. How will you spend it?

50% Invest for retirement (401(k) plans, IRAs)

12.62% Buy groceries

11.97% Pay off old debts

11.97% Buy stock in an investment firm

4.1% Put it in your piggy bank

3.61% Give it to your favorite charity

3.61% None

2.12% Buy a car

5. Bob Dole’s chances for election are starting to dwindle down to nothing. Give Bob some quick advice about how he should spend the next four years:

Our favorite responses:

1. Collecting verbs

2. Becoming a disgruntled postal worker (and secretly disposing of copies of Mother Jones)

3. Return to WWII via time machine, don’t save comrade, keep arm, become doctor as originally planned, lobby against managed health care

4. Start a Bob-Headroom TV show for Network 23 that lets him repeat himself all he wants — “L-L-L-Liberal, L-Liberal Bill Cl-Clinton”

5. Start campaigning for Liddy in 2000

6. If the elections were held today, and all these candidates had an equal chance of winning, who would you vote for?

35.25% Harry Browne (Libertarian)

28.03% Ralph Nader (Green Party)

20.82% Bill Clinton (Democrat)

6.39% Bob Dole (Republican)

4.1% Ross Perot (Reform Party)

2.79% John Hagelin (Natural Law Party)

1.3% None

.66% Howard Phillips (U.S. Taxpayers Party)

.66% Lyndon LaRouche (Democrat)

7. If the elections were held today, and you were restricted to just these two candidates, which one would you vote for?

57.21% Bill Clinton

23.77% None

19.02% Bob Dole

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AN IMPORTANT UPDATE ON MOTHER JONES' FINANCES

We need to start being more upfront about how hard it is keeping a newsroom like Mother Jones afloat these days.

Because it is, and because we're fresh off finishing a fiscal year, on June 30, that came up a bit short of where we needed to be. And this next one simply has to be a year of growth—particularly for donations from online readers to help counter the brutal economics of journalism right now.

Straight up: We need this pitch, what you're reading right now, to start earning significantly more donations than normal. We need people who care enough about Mother Jones’ journalism to be reading a blurb like this to decide to pitch in and support it if you can right now.

Urgent, for sure. But it's not all doom and gloom!

Because over the challenging last year, and thanks to feedback from readers, we've started to see a better way to go about asking you to support our work: Level-headedly communicating the urgency of hitting our fundraising goals, being transparent about our finances, challenges, and opportunities, and explaining how being funded primarily by donations big and small, from ordinary (and extraordinary!) people like you, is the thing that lets us do the type of journalism you look to Mother Jones for—that is so very much needed right now.

And it's really been resonating with folks! Thankfully. Because corporations, powerful people with deep pockets, and market forces will never sustain the type of journalism Mother Jones exists to do. Only people like you will.

There's more about our finances in "News Never Pays," or "It's Not a Crisis. This Is the New Normal," and we'll have details about the year ahead for you soon. But we already know this: The fundraising for our next deadline, $350,000 by the time September 30 rolls around, has to start now, and it has to be stronger than normal so that we don't fall behind and risk coming up short again.

Please consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. We really need to see if we'll be able to raise more with this real estate on a daily basis than we have been, so we're hoping to see a promising start.

—Monika Bauerlein, CEO, and Brian Hiatt, Online Membership Director

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