Chris Christie Will Not Be Our Next President

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The constant drumbeat of attention being paid to New Jersey Governor Chris Christie is really starting to grate. The guy says he’s not going to run. Why not take him at his word and just let him govern New Jersey until 2016?

Answer: because Republicans are in a panic. They don’t trust Romney, they’re increasingly worried that Perry is unelectable, they think Bachmann is a nutcase, and the rest of their field are just fill-ins. So Christie is their once and future saviour. He yells at constituents! He killed a tunnel that liberals loved! He yells at teachers! He cut budgets! He yells at Democratic legislators! What’s not to like?

Lots, it turns out, and Dan Amira finally tallies up Christie’s weak points with the Republican base in a convincing fashion. Christie does like to yell at people, but unfortunately, he likes to yell at crazy conservatives too. In particular, he’s taken very loud, very public positions on illegal immigration, gun control, climate change, education, and Sharia law that are precisely the opposite of the tea party positions. Any one of them would probably be enough to doom his chances, but five? Fuhgeddaboutit. He’d crash and burn before he even had his first chance to yell at a debate moderator for asking him a stupid question.

Note to Republicans: your field is set. Your choice is between an apparently inept Rick Perry and a transparently insincere Mitt Romney. Them’s the breaks. Make the best of it.

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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.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

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