December 15, 2007

Young Girl Goes on the Attack; Obama Stays Positive

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Fun interaction (paraphrased) between Barack Obama and a young attendee at a town hall event here in New Hampton, Iowa:

Young girl: “I just want to say that every time I see a commercial of Mitt Romney on TV I want to throw up.”

Barack Obama: “Haha. Okay. I feel you. What’s your question?”

Young girl: “I just want to say to anyone who is considering voting for Mitt Romney—”

Barack Obama: “Well, hold on, sweetie. I know you have an opinion on Mitt, but I want to use this forum for questions, not to dog Mitt Romney. Though he sometimes uses his town halls to dog me! So why don’t you ask a question.”

Young girl: “Uh, I guess I want to know your thoughts on Mitt Romney.”

Obama said that Romney is a man of accomplishment with great hair. He declined to engage Romney directly because, he said, he isn’t convinced Romney is going to be the Republican nominee. But, boy, Mitt Romney must have run over that little girl’s dog.

Update: Maybe that little girl is really, really good at getting the word out.

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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.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

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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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