The Triumphant Return of the Hack Gap

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Speaking of the hack gap, can I take a little victory lap on this? Think about what we saw last night: Mitt Romney dispassionately marched through the entire oeuvre of conservative obsessions on foreign policy and rejected virtually every single one of them. He’s getting out of Afghanistan with no conditions; he’s happy we helped get rid of Hosni Mubarak; he’ll take no serious action against Syria; he wants to indict Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in the World Court; he didn’t even mention Benghazi; and he refused to say straight-up that he’d support Israel if they bombed Iran. It’s the kind of performance that should have had a guy like Charles Krauthammer tearing his hair out, but instead we got this:

I think it’s unequivocal: Romney won. And he didn’t just win tactically, but strategically.

Was there any rending of garments anywhere else? Not for a second. Conservatives just reveled in the fact that Romney apparently made himself acceptable to undecided voters. Yuval Levin: “Romney clearly achieved his aim.” Ramesh Ponnuru: “Advantage Romney.” Rich Lowry: “Romney executed what must have been his strategy nearly flawlessly.” Bill Kristol: “Tonight, Romney seems as fully capable as—probably more capable than—Barack Obama of being the next president.” Stanley Kurtz: “Romney has now decisively established himself as a credible alternative to Obama.” Erick Erickson: “Mitt Romney won this debate.”

On a substantive level, Romney’s performance from a conservative point of view was worse than Obama’s in the first debate. It was pure rope-a-dope, with Romney abandoning virtually every foreign policy position the right holds dear while utterly refusing to attack President Obama as the weak-kneed appeaser they believe him to be. And yet….no one seemed to mind. As far as the right is concerned, two weeks before an election is no time to get too worried over principle.

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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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