November/December 2006 Issue

The Diddly Awards

The Mike “Snoopy” Dukakis award for campaign elegance

Illustration by: Peter Hoey

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


NOMINEE 1
Senator Joe Biden (D-Del.), the first Democrat to announce that he was exploring a run for president, explained that he doesn’t lust after the executive office, saying, “I’d rather be at home making love to my wife while my children are asleep.”

NOMINEE 2
Rep. Gresham Barrett
(R-S.C.) held a “Shag ‘n’ Eat” fundraiser.

NOMINEE 3
Rep. Jim Moran (D-Va.)
joined his fellow Democrats in denouncing the Republican
“culture of corruption” and the cronyism associated with earmarks—the process that lets members insert a line in a bill to provide funding for a special constituent in the home district. But later in the same speech, noting that he’s likely to become the chairman of an appropriations subcommittee, Moran promised supporters, “When I become chairman, I’m going to
earmark the shit
out of it.”

NOMINEE 4
Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) doesn’t just support building a wall at the border; he wants to run 2,000 miles of electric fence on top of it, carrying “the kind of current that would not kill somebody, but it would simply be a discouragement for them to be fooling around with it. We do that with livestock all the time.”

NOMINEE 5
Rep. Katherine Harris (R-Fla.) told her then-campaign adviser, Ed Rollins, that God had instructed her to stay in the Senate race against Democrat Bill Nelson.

NOMINEE 6
John Jacob (a Republican congressional candidate in Utah) blamed Lucifer himself for sabo­taging his campaign: “There’s another force that wants to keep us from going to Washington, D.C. It’s the devil is what it is.” He added, “I don’t know who else it would be if it wasn’t him. Now when that gets out in the paper, I’m going to be one of the screw-loose people.”

WINNER! Katherine Harris, whose comment prompted Rollins to reply, “Maybe God wants Nelson to stay a senator and that’s why he’s encouraging you to stay in.”

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.

payment methods

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.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate