August 17, 2009

What Obama Should Have Learned From The Gipper

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One of the stranger things about the Obama presidency is how savvy and innovative he was as a candidate about mobilizing public opinion, compared with how conventional, even lackluster, his public outreach has been ever since he moved into the White House. Sure, he’s given a lot of speeches, and some of them have been quite good. But he knew he had several giant contentious policy plans in the works that would infuriate conservatives, whose effectiveness as political performance artists is unparalled. Over at Politics Daily, David Corn argues that Obama hasn’t done enough to prep his grassroots supporters to take on the right-wing noise machine, and that he could avoided the current health care mess by paying more attention to… Ronald Reagan. Check it out here.

 

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WE CAME UP SHORT.

We just wrapped up a shorter-than-normal, urgent-as-ever fundraising drive and we came up about $45,000 short of our $300,000 goal.

That means we're going to have upwards of $350,000, maybe more, to raise in online donations between now and June 30, when our fiscal year ends and we have to get to break-even. And even though there's zero cushion to miss the mark, we won't be all that in your face about our fundraising again until June.

So we urgently need this specific ask, what you're reading right now, to start bringing in more donations than it ever has. The reality, for these next few months and next few years, is that we have to start finding ways to grow our online supporter base in a big way—and we're optimistic we can keep making real headway by being real with you about this.

Because the bottom line: Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism Mother Jones exists to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we hope you might 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.

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