What Obama Should Have Learned From The Gipper

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One of the stranger things about the Obama presidency is how savvy and innovative he was as a candidate about mobilizing public opinion, compared with how conventional, even lackluster, his public outreach has been ever since he moved into the White House. Sure, he’s given a lot of speeches, and some of them have been quite good. But he knew he had several giant contentious policy plans in the works that would infuriate conservatives, whose effectiveness as political performance artists is unparalled. Over at Politics Daily, David Corn argues that Obama hasn’t done enough to prep his grassroots supporters to take on the right-wing noise machine, and that he could avoided the current health care mess by paying more attention to… Ronald Reagan. Check it out here.

 

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BEFORE YOU CLICK AWAY!

“Lying.” “Disgusting.” “Scum.” “Slime.” “Corrupt.” “Enemy of the people.” Donald Trump has always made clear what he thinks of journalists. And it’s plain now that his administration intends to do everything it can to stop journalists from reporting things they don’t like—which is most things that are true.

No one gets to tell Mother Jones what to publish or not publish, because no one owns our fiercely independent newsroom. But that also means we need to directly raise the resources it takes to keep our journalism alive. There’s only one way for that to happen, and it’s readers like you stepping up. Please help with a donation today if you can—even a few bucks will make a real difference. A monthly gift would be incredible.

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