October 13, 2011

Mitt Romney’s Bum of the Month Club

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First we had Romney vs. Trump, then Romney vs. Bachmann, then Romney vs. Perry, and now we have Romney vs. Cain. Remember Joe Louis’ Bum of the Month club? That’s what the Republican primary campaign looks like this year.

The problem with Herman Cain, of course, is basically the same as the problem with Donald Trump: He knows how to stir the troops, but the whole campaign is basically a joke to him—and even tea partiers aren’t going to stick with a guy who treats the presidency like a joke. The zingers are all great, but if you want to be the leader of the free world you can’t perform stupid burlesque about not knowing anything about Uzbeki-beki-beki-stan; if you want to run the economy you can’t build your whole campaign around a corporate slogan like 9/9/9 that even the marks know is ridiculous; and if you want to be commander-in-chief you can’t transparently not care about foreign policy. It’s all fun for a while, but it wears thin pretty quickly when it becomes clear you’re really campaigning to get a Fox News show, not to sit in the Oval Office.

Anyway, to show this graphically, I’ve helpfully extended the latest poll of polls from Real Clear Politics. Perry might do a little better than I’m predicting, but not much. As for Cain, he better enjoy his moment as Mitt Romney’s latest bum. It won’t last much longer.

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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.

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