August 5, 2008

More on Obama and the Blown Town Hall Opportunity

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A commenter at the Plank has another reason why dismissing John McCain’s town hall idea was a missed opportunity for Barack Obama (we discussed this yesterday): it would have distracted attention away from all the attacks that conventional wisdom says are dragging down Obama’s poll numbers.

Here’s jobeek2:

In 2004, the Republicans used the summer lull of non-news to ceaselessly hammer out the trivia of character assassination, and it worked. They’re trying it again now… If Obama had agreed to a series of townhall debates, those encounters would have sucked up all the attention, and we wouldnt have had the news vacuum in which rumours and slander thrive…

I thought Obama should have agreed to the townhall debates even if it *had* been strategically disadvantageous, just because it would have been good for political culture and discourse, for the country basically. But even on a strategic level, participation would have escaped Obama the sordid mess he’s confronting now.

Agreed.

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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.

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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?

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