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TEAM OF RIVALS?….Is Barack Obama really assembling a “team of rivals,” as Abraham Lincoln did in Doris Kearns Goodwin’s account of Lincoln’s presidency? Goodwin’s book was a little too hagiographic for my taste (even Lincoln’s obvious mistakes routinely get spun into accidental acts of genius), but there’s no question that Lincoln really did surround himself with a contentious bunch of personalities. Obama, conversely, doesn’t really seem to be doing that. Hillary Clinton and the other SecState candidates are the only real “rivals” he’s considering for his cabinet, and one cabinet spot hardly counts as a team, does it?

Still, Dan Drezner thinks the Goodwin analogy is serving Obama well:

That said, it’s pretty smart for Obama and his staff to spread this meme around. First, it flatters all of his cabinet officers to think that they’re like Seward, Salmon Chase et al. Second, by invoking the metaphor, Obama gets to frame his administration as evoking both the great challenges of the Civil War period and the greatness of Lincoln.

So maybe Obama isn’t assembling a team of rivals after all, but he’s still a pretty smart cookie for faking us into thinking he is. Nice move from the former gym rat.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT.

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.

You're here for reporting like that, not fundraising, but one cannot exist without the other, and it's vitally important that we hit our intimidating $390,000 number in online donations by June 30.

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