The Price of Trying and Failing

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Polls show repeatedly that people (a) approve of Obama’s specific proposals to boost the economy, but (b) disapprove of Obama’s handling of the economy. Weird! But then again, maybe not. Andrew Sprung points out that there’s a reason Obama lost support after the debt ceiling deal even though the public largely supported his approach:

He wanted to cut spending and raise taxes, and so put the U.S., by his lights, on a firm financial footing for ten years and put the deficit wars behind him. That’s what he told the American people, repeatedly, through the summer. They believed him. They supported him — polls showed strong backing for his “balanced” approach to deficit reduction. And he couldn’t do it — not because he was happy to just cut spending, but because he lashed himself to the debt ceiling mast, notwithstanding the fact that Republicans were swearing their willingness to row him (and the country) over a cliff. He is being punished in the court of public opinion not for trying to compromise but for failing to get a compromise.

The difference is important.

Yes it is. And you know who understands this really, really well? The Republican leadership.

This is one of the reasons I’ve long been skeptical of the notion that Obama should have fought harder for progressive legislation even when it was likely to fail. “At least people would know where he stands,” goes the usual mantra. And that’s true. But what people would also know is that he didn’t have the juice to get anything done. You can stand on a soapbox forever and tell people that this is all the fault of those obstructionist Republicans, but most of them aren’t paying attention. They’ll just vaguely hear that Obama failed yet again and start to think that the guy’s a loser.

Nothing succeeds like success. And nothing helps a president more than an economy that’s actually doing well. The details of failure just don’t matter that much, unfortunately. And Republicans know it. For them, congressional dysfunction is a feature, not a bug.

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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.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

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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