October 13, 2011

Mitt Romney’s Bum of the Month Club

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First we had Romney vs. Trump, then Romney vs. Bachmann, then Romney vs. Perry, and now we have Romney vs. Cain. Remember Joe Louis’ Bum of the Month club? That’s what the Republican primary campaign looks like this year.

The problem with Herman Cain, of course, is basically the same as the problem with Donald Trump: He knows how to stir the troops, but the whole campaign is basically a joke to him—and even tea partiers aren’t going to stick with a guy who treats the presidency like a joke. The zingers are all great, but if you want to be the leader of the free world you can’t perform stupid burlesque about not knowing anything about Uzbeki-beki-beki-stan; if you want to run the economy you can’t build your whole campaign around a corporate slogan like 9/9/9 that even the marks know is ridiculous; and if you want to be commander-in-chief you can’t transparently not care about foreign policy. It’s all fun for a while, but it wears thin pretty quickly when it becomes clear you’re really campaigning to get a Fox News show, not to sit in the Oval Office.

Anyway, to show this graphically, I’ve helpfully extended the latest poll of polls from Real Clear Politics. Perry might do a little better than I’m predicting, but not much. As for Cain, he better enjoy his moment as Mitt Romney’s latest bum. It won’t last much longer.

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THE FACTS SPEAK FOR THEMSELVES.

At least we hope they will, because that’s our approach to raising the $350,000 in online donations we need right now—during our high-stakes December fundraising push.

It’s the most important month of the year for our fundraising, with upward of 15 percent of our annual online total coming in during the final week—and there’s a lot to say about why Mother Jones’ journalism, and thus hitting that big number, matters tremendously right now.

But you told us fundraising is annoying—with the gimmicks, overwrought tone, manipulative language, and sheer volume of urgent URGENT URGENT!!! content we’re all bombarded with. It sure can be.

So we’re going to try making this as un-annoying as possible. In “Let the Facts Speak for Themselves” we give it our best shot, answering three questions that most any fundraising should try to speak to: Why us, why now, why does it matter?

The upshot? Mother Jones does journalism you don’t find elsewhere: in-depth, time-intensive, ahead-of-the-curve reporting on underreported beats. We operate on razor-thin margins in an unfathomably hard news business, and can’t afford to come up short on these online goals. And given everything, reporting like ours is vital right now.

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