June 23, 1997

Washington Squares

Each week until July 14, MoJo Wire lets you test your prowess with political trivia and gives you a chance to win a <b>FREE</b> subscription to <i>Mother Jones</i> magazine. Every Tuesday we’ll have a new set of questions about a different politician, plus the answers and winners from the week before. Just make sure you play before 5 p.m. Pacific Time each Monday.

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


This Week: Phil Gramm

Phil GrammThe Republican Senator (and 1996 presidential candidate) from Texas mixes economic conservatism with homespun rhetoric. Gramm’s folksy vernacular endorses budget cuts and decreased government spending by pointing to Dicky Flatt, a print shop owner from Mexia, Tex., as a symbolic everyman. In the same hard-nosed spirit, Gramm urges welfare recipients to “get out of the wagon and help the rest of us pull.”

Gramm’s plain spoken, conservative politics have made him one of the most visible players in the G.O.P., despite the fact that he served his first three terms in Congress as a Democrat. Test your knowledge of his one-liners below.

  1. Gramm once described himself as:

    “The pit bull of the American Right.”
    “Strom Thurmond without the orange hair.”
    “The skunk at the garden party.”
    “Dickey Flatt’s second cousin.”
    “A foot soldier for the Bush Revolution.”

  2. Gramm earned a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Georgia, but his early educational experiences were rocky, to say the least. Which of the following grades did Gramm not fail?

    3rd
    4th
    7th
    9th

  3. In 1974, Gramm sent investment money to the producer of which two movies?

    “Truck Stop Women” and “Beauty Queens”
    “The Candidate” and “All the President’s Men”
    “Debbie Does Dallas” and “Saturday Night Fever”
    “Night of the Living Dead” and “Nightmare on Elm Street”
    “The Story of O” and “The Hatchet Murders”

  4. When asked if he would consider a woman as his vice-presidential running mate, how did Gramm respond?

    “Like who — some witch like Bella Abzug?”
    “I can’t imagine a woman saying yes.”
    “Elizabeth Dole says she’s sticking with Bob.”
    “We need brains, not boobs.”
    “Sophia Loren is not a citizen.”

  5. According to Gramm, “I own more _____________ than I need. But not as many as I want.”

    porno magazines
    pictures of myself
    web pages
    copies of Newt’s novel
    shotguns

Your name:

Your e-mail address
(for prize notification only):

Plus, you can add your name to our mailing list:

We’re compiling the results from this quiz, please come back later

Ted Rueter is the author of several books on politics, including The Newt Gingrich Quiz Book and The Rush Limbaugh Quiz Book.

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