March 12, 2008

Hey, Did You Hear Barack Obama Is Black?

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As you know, Geraldine Ferraro went and expounded on her original comments on race and gender by making them worse. But you may not know that she went on TV this morning, ignoring my advice (“go away!”), and continued her insanity.

Clearly the Clinton campaign hasn’t told Ferraro to stay quiet; to the contrary, it is trotting her out. So, screw it, I’m posting this:

An emailer writes in with an excellent summary of the Ferraro situation:

Seems to me she probably made the original comment off the top of her head, but [the Clinton campaign] made a very cynical short-term political calculation that among the white voters of Pennsylvania painting Obama as a whiny affirmative action case who’s constantly “playing the race card” and is racist against whites(!) is in their best interest. Maybe they’re right! But you know what, after Mississippi yesterday, Obama has a /bigger/ delegate lead (161) than he had before March 4th. Which means in the last week and a half, while HRC has been “winning” the narrative, she’s lost ground in the nomination battle.

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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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