John McCain’s Top Priorities: Getting Your Vote, Questioning Obama on Iraq, and… Golf?

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In anticipation of the general election, the McCain campaign just revamped its website to focus more specifically on his contest with Barack Obama. The front page now has four main tabs that visitors can use to access the rest of the site. They are, in this order: “Decision Center,” “General Election,” “Obama & Iraq,” and “Golf Gear.”

Golf gear?

mccain%20golf%20gear.JPG

It’s no surprise that John McCain wants you to donate money, and of course he wants you to know what he thinks of his opponent. But what he wants just as much is for you to head out to the green with your buddies, McCain golf pack in tow.

The disdain you may notice in my voice is not because the maverick is trying to sell us something—in the modern campaign, every candidate needs merchandise. It’s that he’s pushing golf, the classic sport of the leisure class. Even George Bush, historically oblivious to the pain of the common man, claimed recently to have given up golf because he couldn’t bear the irony of trying to perfect his swing while troops died in Iraq. “I don’t want some mom whose son may have recently died to see the Commander-in-Chief playing golf,” he said recently in an interview with Politico. “I think playing golf during a war just sends the wrong signal.” McCain apparently didn’t get the memo…perhaps he was out golfing?

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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.

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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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