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This is the story of how the establishment really works, the inside scoop on how to get very close to walking down the corridors of power with Bill and Hillary and many charming economists. It’s a story of preparation, timing, and chicken breasts done in a light tarragon sauce.

In the early seventies, at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, there were three friends: Tracy and Patty and Erik. They matriculated with flapping colors and started their careers. Tracy became a magazine journalist; Patty became a restaurateur; Erik became a screenwriter.

In due time, they each married. Tracy married me, which was sound thinking on her part. Patty married Tim, who was a fine lawyer and an accomplished after-dinner debater. Erik married Laura, who was an economist.

Tracy and Patty and Erik all liked to talk, Erik most of all. He was a raconteur, and he knew it. Probably all raconteurs know they’re raconteurs, but Erik delivered value for money. He held forth. He also provided good cigars and poured good brandy. Dinner at Erik and Laura’s was always welcome. There was lots of laughter.

I should mention perhaps that I too like to talk just a little bit. I have the kind of chatty shallowness that is often a useful tool for social survival. So what with Tim debating and Erik quipping and me anecdoting and Patty opining and Tracy narrating, it got pretty darned noisy around the table.

Naturally, because I have a sensitive kind of shallowness, I asked Laura about her work. She said she was interested in certain trade issues that were emerging in Yugoslavia after Tito.

Well, yes. Now, that is very, very important, the trade issue in the Balkan regions. We can all learn a lot from modeling, I suppose you could say, the trade, as it were, structures that have relevance to the new emerging Europe and the collapsing Soviet Union, Turkey, protectionism, and so forth. Yes.

But somehow we never got to the bottom of the Yugoslavia thing. Laura was off to Belgrade again. Was it likely to be cold? Were the restaurants open late? We drew Laura out. Room service was not to be trusted, it appeared.

Then Erik and Laura went away to Massachusetts for a year. We heard that Harvard and UC Berkeley were actually vying for Laura’s services. Largish sums of money were being discussed; apparently the universities were willing to create entire institutes just for the privilege of having Laura head them.

“Is Laura like distinguished or something?” I asked Tracy.

“We should really ask her,” said Tracy.

We did. Laura laughed. She has a genuinely musical laugh, a kind of un-forced glissando. “Maybe they like my ideas,” she said. I was about to ask about the precise nature of those ideas when anecdotage erupted at the other end of the table.

So then it was 1992. Yugoslavia had ceased to exist and with it, one suspected, some really fascinating trade issues. There was a benefit for the Clinton campaign at Patty’s restaurant. Laura was to be the main speaker, and I was to introduce her. We were sitting around the table waiting for some exquisite California salad, greens that were largely not green at all, to be placed in front of us.

“Whaddya think of this whole BCCI thing?” I asked Laura. I mean, hell, she’s an economist and BCCI was a bank.

“I don’t know anything about it, really.”

“I tend toward a cynical view.”

Laura smiled. “I think it would be almost impossible to have a too- cynical view of it,” she said.

So two months later, Laura D’Andrea Tyson was named to chair the President’s Council of Economic Advisers, surprising the hell out of me and, it would seem, a lot of grumpy, middle-aged, white guys, including the much-loathed Lawrence Summers, formerly allied with the World Bank.

She was immediately vilified–my friend Laura of the tarragon chicken and green beans, the belle of Belgrade, the toast of two universities–in the New York Times, which also called Erik a “pianist.” I mean, he owns a piano. It is not the same thing. She refused to comment “through a spokesman.” Yow!

I realized then that she had become a headline, that her opinion suddenly had powerful international heft. The Chairperson of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers said recently that “no view is too cynical” in assessing the still-emerging BCCI scandal.

Her remarks were taken out of context by a close friend.

Well, I expect now that Erik and Laura are settled, they’ll be asking us to Georgetown for one of those fine chicken dinners and Bill and Hillary will drop by and we’ll talk about Jerry Jeff Walker and Egg McMuffins and, I dunno, restructuring the unfair tax situation for free-lance writers. Perhaps, however, every time Laura opens her mouth, the rest of us will shut up just for a moment, in case she’s about to utter one of those distinguished comments she is said to make with some regularity.

If we listen closely enough, she might even tell us how she plans to cope with Lloyd Bentsen, an individual about whom, it is my belief, no view is too cynical.

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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 canā€™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 wonā€™t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its futureā€”you.

And we need readers to show up for us big timeā€”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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