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PRESIDENTIAL SUCCESS….Matt Yglesias predicts a land office business after the election in op-eds warning Democrats not to get too full of themselves, but argues that analogies to Clinton’s first couple of years are off base:

But that aside, I just think it’s pretty blinkered to act as if the electorate has a deep commitment (or lack of commitment) to bipartisanship or some finely nuanced conception of moderation. Rather, voters tend to re-elect incumbents when things seem to be working out okay whereas they tend to punish incumbents — and those closely associated with incumbents — when things seem to be going poorly. What Democrats need to do if they want to prosper in 2010 and 2012 is deliver the goods. In other words, return the economy to prosperity, avoid terrible foreign affairs calamities, etc.

I think that’s right. Obviously administrations need to pick their spots — in retrospect, leading off his first week in office with a proposal to allow gays in the military didn’t do Clinton any good — but the key thing is to succeed, and then to get credit for succeeding. If the opposition is able to frame the terms of the debate, or if you allow the press to frame success with its usual idiotic “hundred days” narrative, you’re behind the eight ball before you even start.

(Please, please, Senator Obama: make clear to the media that you aren’t planning to change the shape of the country in your first hundred days. Please. It’s long past time for this trope to be buried once and for all. Only one president in history has ever done this, and you won’t be the second.)

So what would success look like? I’ve said this before, but I’d put my money on three things:

  • Withdrawal from Iraq. Sure, sure, Obama will leave a few “residual troops” in place. I get it. But it’s time to get out.

  • Serious healthcare reform. Obviously I’d prefer reform even more serious than what Obama has proposed, but his plan is a good start if it doesn’t get watered down too much.

  • Carbon pricing. Obama needs to pass a real energy plan that includes a version of cap-and-trade with teeth. (A carbon tax would also be fine, but I don’t think that’s politically feasible.) Price signals work, and increasing the price of carbon has to be the backbone of any attempt to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases. We’re already too late on this, and getting the rest of the world on board may take decades, but we have to start. We’re condemning hundreds of millions of people to an early death if we don’t.

So those are my big three: Iraq, healthcare, and carbon. Get something serous done on those issues, and Obama’s administration will be a big success. Fail on them, and it’s not clear to me that any combination of other new programs will be enough to salvage it.

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We have a considerable $390,000 gap in our online fundraising budget that we have to close by June 30. There is no wiggle room, we've already cut everything we can, and we urgently need more readers to pitch in—especially from this specific blurb you're reading right now.

We'll also be quite transparent and level-headed with you about this.

In "News Never Pays," our fearless CEO, Monika Bauerlein, connects the dots on several concerning media trends that, taken together, expose the fallacy behind the tragic state of journalism right now: That the marketplace will take care of providing the free and independent press citizens in a democracy need, and the Next New Thing to invest millions in will fix the problem. Bottom line: Journalism that serves the people needs the support of the people. That's the Next New Thing.

And it's what MoJo and our community of readers have been doing for 47 years now.

But staying afloat is harder than ever.

In "This Is Not a Crisis. It's The New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, why this moment is particularly urgent, and how we can best communicate that without screaming OMG PLEASE HELP over and over. We also touch on our history and how our nonprofit model makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there: Letting us go deep, focus on underreported beats, and bring unique perspectives to the day's news.

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