January 13, 2014

It Doesn’t Matter What Republicans Say About Bridgegate

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I gather that the main Republican response to Bridgegate has now been settled. There are two parts to it:

  • Hey, at least Christie came clean with his manly press conference and his decisive firing of Bridget Anne Kelly. That’s more than Obama has ever done.
  • It’s nowhere near as bad as Benghazi or the IRS scandal.

Will this two-pronged counterattack work? It’s obviously pretty puerile, only slightly more sophisticated than your average kindergarten playground comeback, but my guess is that it doesn’t matter. Pretty much any reaction will work if the scandal doesn’t get any worse and no evidence pops up that implicates Christie himself. Conversely, no amount of agit-prop will work if it turns out that Christie knew more about this than he’s letting on. This is a scandal in which the messaging campaign just doesn’t matter. All that matters is what crawls out when more rocks start getting turned over.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

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Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

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