Hitting Dodd Where it Hurts: Your Pocket

Courtest of Rob Simmons for US Senate.

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The Dodd wars continue. As I noted recently, the embattled five-term senator and his surrogates have been fighting to dispel the notion that Dodd is too cozy with K Street and Wall Street, which he oversees as the chairman of the Senate banking committee. In the past, lobbyists and finance industry execs and PACs—along with insurance industry interests—have been prolific donors to Dodd’s campaigns, which make him a fairly easy target for attack campaigns like this. And Team Dodd, strenously trying to rehab the senator’s image, has fired back with ads like this.

The latest salvo comes from one of Dodd’s Republican challengers, former congressman Rob Simmons, whose campaign has launched a “Put Chris Dodd in Your Pocket” fundraising drive.

If you’re a wealthy special interest donor — like Angelo Mozilo of Countrywide Mortgage, or the guys at AIG, or even a pawn shop owner — you can rest easy knowing that you have a powerful Senator like Chris Dodd in your back pocket.

Now you as an ordinary citizen can have Chris Dodd in your pocket — and for a lot less than the millions in campaign contributions the banking, financial services, and insurance industries have showered on Chairman Dodd over the years.

Donate $5 or more to our campaign and receive your own personal “Pocket Dodd” you can cut out and display as a reminder of the special interest cronyism we’ll finally be rid of in November 2010.

In the last few years, Pocket Dodd has been busy: moving to Iowa, launching a frivolous campaign for President, jetting off to his cottage in Ireland — anything but doing his job overseeing a financial industry in crisis.

Meanwhile, Dodd’s heavy-handed efforts to distance himself from K Street have largely been met with ridicule inside the beltway. It certainly didn’t help his cause when he recently attended the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee’s annual retreat, held this year on Martha’s Vineyard, along with some of K Street’s most powerful players.

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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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