Barack Obama and the Chamber of Secrets

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Ezra Klein doesn’t think that Democratic attacks on the Chamber of Commerce are doing them any good:

A MoveOn.org poll showing that voters respond negatively when asked, “If a candidate is backed by anonymous or corporate groups, which run ads that mask their identity, does that make you more likely to vote for that candidate?” doesn’t prove otherwise. You can poll any attack line or boast in isolation and voters will like it. What would prove — or at least suggest — otherwise is evidence that these attacks are swinging voters toward the Democrats. But if anything, the opposite is happening.

I agree, but I’d offer up two responses. First, it’s too early. The anti-Chamber campaign has only been active for a few days. That’s far too short a time to see any effect even if it’s a good electoral strategy. Second, I think of this in much longer terms. It might or might not help in the November midterms, but Democrats really need to let the public know that the Chamber should be thought of the same way as the NRA: an extremely aggressive special interest group with huge amounts of cash and a hyper-partisan outlook. Getting that message out successfully doesn’t mean the Chamber would be defanged. The NRA, after all, is still famously powerful. But it does mean that it might lose some of its influence among centrist leaners, who still think of the Chamber as a vaguely reliable souce of civic worthiness and don’t realize what Tom Donohue has turned it into. That’s useful stuff for future elections whether or not it does any good this year.

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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.

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