October 30, 1996

The Mother Jones Poll

The MoJo Wire invites you to jump on the Soapbox one last time and express your opinions during this campaign season. This week, imagine that you’ve just been elected president after a long and arduous campaign. What will your first moves be? Be sure to check out the results from our previous polls.

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1. Like we said, you’re now the president. Who will you pick to be in your cabinet?

a. Defense Secretary:
 		b. Education Secretary:
c. Press Secretary:
 		d. Drug Czar:
e. FBI Director:

2. You’ve got this BIG budget deficit, and (silly) you promised a middle-class tax cut during your campaign. What program will you cut (or “decrease growth”) first in order to get the budget balanced?

Medicare/Medicaid

Social Security

Defense

Education

Environment

3. You get a lot of squeaking from lobbyists from investment firms that Social Security should be “privatized.” What do you do?

Work for the privatization of SS

Work against the privatization of SS

4. Okay, so you never really made it to the White House. After all, with your name on so few of the ballots and having so little cash in your campaign coffers…Now you’re faced with planning for your retirement like the rest of us schleps. Social Security has been privatized by President Clinton/Dole, so you get the cash in hand every month. How will you spend it?

Invest for retirement (401(k) plans, IRAs)

Put it in your piggy bank

Pay off old debts

Buy groceries

Buy a car

Give it to your favorite charity

Buy stock in an investment firm

5. Bob Dole’s chances for election are looking mighty grim. Give Bob some quick advice about how he should spend the next four years. Best answer wins a MoJo Wire hat.

6. If the elections were held today, and all these candidates had an equal chance of winning, who would you vote for?

Bob Dole (Republican)

Bill Clinton (Democrat)

Ross Perot (Reform Party)

Ralph Nader (Green Party)

Harry Browne (Libertarian)

Howard Phillips (U.S. Taxpayers Party)

Lyndon LaRouche (Democrat)

John Hagelin (Natural Law Party)

7. If the elections were held today, and you were restricted to just these two candidates, which one would you vote for?

Bob Dole

Bill Clinton

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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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