Rick Santorum Playing the Class Warfare Card

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Check out this campaign dispatch from LA Times reporter Paul West:

“I don’t come from the elite. My grandfather was a coal miner. I grew up in public housing on a VA grounds. I worked my way to the success that I had, and I’m proud of it,” Santorum said Saturday in Troy, before a working-class audience gathered in the county where Romney enjoyed a privileged upbringing. Santorum didn’t elaborate, but his family wasn’t poor; his father, a psychologist, and his mother, a nurse, worked for the Veterans Administration — now the Department of Veterans Affairs — which provided them with an apartment.

….Santorum’s latest campaign ad attacks Romney for “turning his back on Michigan workers” without mentioning that Santorum also opposed the auto industry bailout.

How about that? A campaign story that actually fact checks a candidate’s statements in real time. Good work!

The rest of the story is mainly about the gobsmacking way in which a Republican primary race has pretty much turned into the class warfare they all claim to loathe so much when Democrats do it. My grandfather was a coal miner! The other guy makes a lot of money! College is for snobs! And of course, Romney is helping Santorum’s cause by pandering for the NASCAR vote and then admitting he doesn’t really care much about the sport but “I have some great friends who are NASCAR team owners.” It’s an edifying spectacle.

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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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