John McCain’s Top Priorities: Getting Your Vote, Questioning Obama on Iraq, and… Golf?

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In anticipation of the general election, the McCain campaign just revamped its website to focus more specifically on his contest with Barack Obama. The front page now has four main tabs that visitors can use to access the rest of the site. They are, in this order: “Decision Center,” “General Election,” “Obama & Iraq,” and “Golf Gear.”

Golf gear?

mccain%20golf%20gear.JPG

It’s no surprise that John McCain wants you to donate money, and of course he wants you to know what he thinks of his opponent. But what he wants just as much is for you to head out to the green with your buddies, McCain golf pack in tow.

The disdain you may notice in my voice is not because the maverick is trying to sell us something—in the modern campaign, every candidate needs merchandise. It’s that he’s pushing golf, the classic sport of the leisure class. Even George Bush, historically oblivious to the pain of the common man, claimed recently to have given up golf because he couldn’t bear the irony of trying to perfect his swing while troops died in Iraq. “I don’t want some mom whose son may have recently died to see the Commander-in-Chief playing golf,” he said recently in an interview with Politico. “I think playing golf during a war just sends the wrong signal.” McCain apparently didn’t get the memo…perhaps he was out golfing?

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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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