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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DONALD TRUMP & DEMOCRACY

Mother Jones was founded to do things differently in the aftermath of a political crisis: Watergate. We stand for justice and democracy. We reject false equivalence. We go after, and go deep on, stories others don’t. And we’re a nonprofit newsroom because we knew corporations and billionaires would never fund the journalism we do. Our reporting makes a difference in policies and people’s lives changed.

And we need your support like never before to vigorously fight back against the existential threats American democracy and journalism face. We’re running behind our online fundraising targets and urgently need all hands on deck right now. We can’t afford to come up short—we have no cushion; we leave it all on the field.

Please help with a donation today if you can—even just a few bucks helps. Not ready to donate but interested in our work? Sign up for our Daily newsletter to stay well-informed—and see what makes our people-powered, not profit-driven, journalism special.

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