The Triumphant Return of the Hack Gap

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Speaking of the hack gap, can I take a little victory lap on this? Think about what we saw last night: Mitt Romney dispassionately marched through the entire oeuvre of conservative obsessions on foreign policy and rejected virtually every single one of them. He’s getting out of Afghanistan with no conditions; he’s happy we helped get rid of Hosni Mubarak; he’ll take no serious action against Syria; he wants to indict Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in the World Court; he didn’t even mention Benghazi; and he refused to say straight-up that he’d support Israel if they bombed Iran. It’s the kind of performance that should have had a guy like Charles Krauthammer tearing his hair out, but instead we got this:

I think it’s unequivocal: Romney won. And he didn’t just win tactically, but strategically.

Was there any rending of garments anywhere else? Not for a second. Conservatives just reveled in the fact that Romney apparently made himself acceptable to undecided voters. Yuval Levin: “Romney clearly achieved his aim.” Ramesh Ponnuru: “Advantage Romney.” Rich Lowry: “Romney executed what must have been his strategy nearly flawlessly.” Bill Kristol: “Tonight, Romney seems as fully capable as—probably more capable than—Barack Obama of being the next president.” Stanley Kurtz: “Romney has now decisively established himself as a credible alternative to Obama.” Erick Erickson: “Mitt Romney won this debate.”

On a substantive level, Romney’s performance from a conservative point of view was worse than Obama’s in the first debate. It was pure rope-a-dope, with Romney abandoning virtually every foreign policy position the right holds dear while utterly refusing to attack President Obama as the weak-kneed appeaser they believe him to be. And yet….no one seemed to mind. As far as the right is concerned, two weeks before an election is no time to get too worried over principle.

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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.

If you can afford to part with a few bucks, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones with a much-needed year-end donation. And please do it now, while you’re thinking about it—with fewer people paying attention to the news like you are, we need everyone with us to get there.

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