Bush or Cheney: Who’s the Bigger Bogeyman?

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George W. Bush or Dick Cheney—who’s more frightening to liberals? Some progressive political strategists seem to believe the answer is Cheney.

This past weekend, Democracy for America, a grassroots progressive founded by Howard Dean that recruits, trains, promotes, and funds progressive candidates, sent out a an email signed by Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT). The piece focused on the current fight over whether to extend the Bush administration tax cuts for folks who make more than $250,000 a year. Leahy’s email read,

To this day, America’s top income-earners—households making more than $250,000 a year—aren’t paying their fair share in taxes. Letting these tax cuts for the wealthy continue for another decade would saddle middle class Americans, our kids, and our grandkids with an additional $680 billion of debt, largely payable to the Chinese government.

The Bush-Cheney tax cuts for the wealthy are wrong. Thankfully they’re set to expire this December, unless Republicans in Congress get their way and renew them indefinitely.

With debate set to begin on the Senate floor as early as next week, we don’t have a lot of time to get this right.

Leahy asked recipients of the email to sign a petition urging Congress to allow the tax cuts for the rich to expire. And in his note, he repeatedly referred to these breaks as the “Bush-Cheney tax cuts.”

Yet the email’s subject line put it a bit differently. When a recipient spotted the email in his or her inbox, the note was titled, “Dick Cheney’s Tax Cut.” The guy at the top was missing. The point of a subject line for a mass email is to get the recipient to click and open the message. DFA’s consultants must figure that Cheney is more of a motivator for their target audience than Bush. That prompts a question: should Democrats this campaign season run against “Cheney Republicans”?

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WE CAME UP SHORT.

We just wrapped up a shorter-than-normal, urgent-as-ever fundraising drive and we came up about $45,000 short of our $300,000 goal.

That means we're going to have upwards of $350,000, maybe more, to raise in online donations between now and June 30, when our fiscal year ends and we have to get to break-even. And even though there's zero cushion to miss the mark, we won't be all that in your face about our fundraising again until June.

So we urgently need this specific ask, what you're reading right now, to start bringing in more donations than it ever has. The reality, for these next few months and next few years, is that we have to start finding ways to grow our online supporter base in a big way—and we're optimistic we can keep making real headway by being real with you about this.

Because the bottom line: Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism Mother Jones exists to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. We really need to see if we'll be able to raise more with this real estate on a daily basis than we have been, so we're hoping to see a promising start.

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