Bobby Jindal, Reborn to Run

Photo by dsb nola, <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/derek_b/2549541623/">via Flickr</a>.

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Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal’s debut book, Leadership and Crisis, comes out on Monday, and Politico’s preview makes it sound like the one-time-and-potentially-future GOP golden boy spends a significant part of it criticizing President Obama for playing politics with the Gulf oil spill. Jindal highlights this as evidence of the greater state of affairs in Washington, where, he writes, “Political posturing becomes more important than reality.”

But wait—doesn’t using your first book as a 39-year-old first-term governor and presidential hopeful to accuse the Obama administration of playing politics…amount to playing politics, too? During the crisis it was clear that Jindal saw the spill as a way to regain some national attention.

After his disastrous State of the Union rebuttal last year, his first foray into the national spotlight, Jindal laid fairly low. But in the wake of the spill, he spared no effort when it came to lobbing rhetorical bombs at the administration, including accusing it of “making excuses for BP” and lambasting the lack of “detailed plans” for response.

Jindal’s criticism ignored the fact that, as a member of Congress, he himself played a major role in efforts to open vast new areas offshore for drilling—without doing anything in the way of improving regulations.

Jindal clearly saw his battles with the administration over the spill response as political opportunities. He hammered the White House on issues like building sand berms along the coast, even after the federal government gave the state permission to build them and even when the state was flagrantly violating the permits it was granted. Jindal’s berm war was little more than political grandstanding, at the cost of long-term protection of his state’s coastal ecosystems.

So it’s little surprise that Jindal makes a big deal of this issue in his new book. Nor is it surprising that his supporters are already planning fundraisers for this “eventual presidential contender.”

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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.

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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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