A Tale of Two “Seinfeld” Bosses (…and Campaign Cash)

Lippman & Peterman: A Seinfeld house divided.<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAlinvw2Rb0">AudiovisualCorner</a>/YouTube ; <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VSKn8RlD7Is">WhimOfTheWorld</a>/YouTube

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It’s confirmed: Not all of Elaine Benes‘ bosses vote Republican.

A couple weeks ago, I dug through campaign data and found a bunch of underreported and surprising celebrity campaign contributions (A-Rod going to bat for Romney, Miami Vice‘s Don Johnson shelling out for Obama, etc.). In the glut of data was actor John O’Hurley, best known for his role as catalog executive J. Peterman, Elaine’s idiosyncratic boss on Seinfeld. (You might also know O’Hurley from his work as a host on Family Feud, Professor Beltran on Sabrina, The Teenage Witch, or his fundraising for Mark Cuban’s Fallen Patriot Fund.) O’Hurley gave $1,000 to Romney’s 2012 campaign.

Shortly after the story ran, Mother Jones received this email from a one Richard Fancy, residing in Southern California:

I played Mr. Lippman, Elaine Benis’ first boss on Seinfeld, and I just want you to know that not ALL of Elaine Benis’ idiosyncratic bosses support Mitt. I’m a proud, nervous Obama supporter.

(We have Seinfeld fans in the DC bureau. You can imagine our immediate reaction to this.)

You might remember Mr. Lippman: He was Elaine’s boss at a New York publishing house called Pendant Publishing. He fired George after George had raucous sex with the cleaning lady in an office cubicle. He sneezed on his hands in the presence of Japanese businessmen, thus setting off a chain reaction that results in the near-demise of Elaine’s professional life.

Actor Richard Fancy, with his wife Joanna (and under her name), has donated around $650 in total across the board to Democratic candidates, including Tammy Baldwin, Elizabeth Warren, and Obama. “Obama doesn’t excite me; he campaigned on ‘hope,’ which is bullshit,” Fancy told Mother Jones during a subsequent phone conversation. “But Democrats basically believe in giving back some of the money they’ve stolen…My fear is that if Mitt Romney is elected, he won’t have the freedom that a rich white man usually does, and he’ll be controlled by the dominant sect of the Republican Party that’s become crazified.”

Fancy is also noted for his character-actor work on films like Oliver Stone’s Nixon (in which he played Defense Secretary Melvin Laird), the 1984 miniseries George Washington (he played Samuel Adams), Being John Malkovich, the heartfelt teen sex romp The Girl Next Door, and the vastly underrated Psycho Beach Party. And he also has a lot of TV credits to his name, including the daytime soap General Hospital, and a role as Vulcan captain Satelk in the Star Trek franchise:

Via wiki Not the only Vulcan who supports the incumbent this year. Via Memory Alpha Star Trek Wiki

This presidential election, you’re either a Mr. Peterman voter or a Mr. Lippman voter. Although Mr. Pitt would probably vote for Virgil Goode, so there’s always that.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT.

We have a considerable $390,000 gap in our online fundraising budget that we have to close by June 30. There is no wiggle room, we've already cut everything we can, and we urgently need more readers to pitch in—especially from this specific blurb you're reading right now.

We'll also be quite transparent and level-headed with you about this.

In "News Never Pays," our fearless CEO, Monika Bauerlein, connects the dots on several concerning media trends that, taken together, expose the fallacy behind the tragic state of journalism right now: That the marketplace will take care of providing the free and independent press citizens in a democracy need, and the Next New Thing to invest millions in will fix the problem. Bottom line: Journalism that serves the people needs the support of the people. That's the Next New Thing.

And it's what MoJo and our community of readers have been doing for 47 years now.

But staying afloat is harder than ever.

In "This Is Not a Crisis. It's The New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, why this moment is particularly urgent, and how we can best communicate that without screaming OMG PLEASE HELP over and over. We also touch on our history and how our nonprofit model makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there: Letting us go deep, focus on underreported beats, and bring unique perspectives to the day's news.

You're here for reporting like that, not fundraising, but one cannot exist without the other, and it's vitally important that we hit our intimidating $390,000 number in online donations by June 30.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. It's going to be a nail-biter, and we really need to see donations from this specific ask coming in strong if we're going to get there.

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