December 6, 2010

Ranking the Presidents

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The Gallup poll below is being touted as a “ranking” of modern presidents, and it puts John F. Kennedy at the top. (I guess Eisenhower doesn’t count as “modern.”) This is obviously crazy, but when I clicked the link I discovered that it wasn’t really a ranking of who was the best president, it was a ranking of retrospective job approval ratings:

That’s not quite so crazy. It’s probably still wrong, but not crazy. Kennedy did some popular things, handled the White House with style, and was assassinated before his administration had time to become widely loathed, which it likely would have been had he stayed in office for a full eight years. He never really had a chance to outlast his honeymoon, and LBJ ended up taking the hit for Vietnam and 60s unrest more generally.

In any case, the innate good sense of the American public is shown by George W. Bush’s low ranking. I just hope that as time goes by, people remember what a bad president he was. He’s not a president who deserves to benefit from the rosiness of faded memories.

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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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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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