June 30, 2015

Chris Christie Announces Presidential Bid, Doesn’t Break Internet

The reaction to Christie’s declaration is not overwhelming.

Dennis Van Tine/ZUMA

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On Tuesday morning, Chris Christie, the brash and gruff scandal-tainted governor of New Jersey, announced he was officially entering the GOP race for president. Flanked by his wife Mary Pat Foster and his four kids, Christie hit the stage at his high school alma mater to Bon Jovi’s “We Weren’t Born To Follow,” and he declared, “We must tell each other the truth about the problems we have and the difficulty of the solutions.”

Once upon a time, Christie was widely regarded as a potential leader of the GOP pack; he was a favorite of Republican-leaning billionaires (Koch Brothers and others) and a GOPer who could boast success in a Democratic state. His entry into the contest would have been major news. But after Bridgegate and various economic setbacks in New Jersey, he’s fighting for to be at the top of the second tier. (There are now 14 contenders officially in the race.) A recent poll found that only 4 percent of Republican voters want to see Christie as president. And his announcement hardly set the Internet on fire.

Here’s some of the immediate reaction on Twitter, which was, to tell it like it is, a bit underwhelming:

Ann Coulter

Laura Ingraham

Ted Cruz

Greta Van Susteren

Mark Murray

Nate Silver

Fortune

Deborah Wasserman Schultz

Seton Hall Law

Mashable

Chris Christie has gone from telling people to sit down and shut up to having to ask them for attention.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

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Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

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