December 28, 2011

Your Daily Newt: Curling Into a Ball and Playing Dead

GOP presidential candidate Newt Gingrich.Robin Nelson/ZumaPress

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As a service to our readers, every day we are delivering a classic moment from the political life of Newt Gingrich—until he either clinches the nomination or bows out.

Is this “a classic moment from the political life of Newt Gingrich”? Perhaps not. But this lede, from Karen Tumulty and Nancy Gibbs at Time, is worth making an exception for:

Newt Gingrich had a favorite game when he was growing up in Hummelstown, Pennsylvania. His pal Dennis Yantz would pretend to beat him up and leave him crumpled on the curb. “When a car would pull up to see what was wrong,” Yantz recalls, “Newt would jump up and scream ‘SURPRISE!’ We would do this over and over again.” For some reason, Yantz says, Newt always wanted to be the one who played dead.

And that, in a nutshell, is the 2012 Republican presidential primary.

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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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