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.

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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:

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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.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT.

We have a considerable $390,000 gap in our online fundraising budget that we have to close by June 30. There is no wiggle room, we've already cut everything we can, and we urgently need more readers to pitch in—especially from this specific blurb you're reading right now.

We'll also be quite transparent and level-headed with you about this.

In "News Never Pays," our fearless CEO, Monika Bauerlein, connects the dots on several concerning media trends that, taken together, expose the fallacy behind the tragic state of journalism right now: That the marketplace will take care of providing the free and independent press citizens in a democracy need, and the Next New Thing to invest millions in will fix the problem. Bottom line: Journalism that serves the people needs the support of the people. That's the Next New Thing.

And it's what MoJo and our community of readers have been doing for 47 years now.

But staying afloat is harder than ever.

In "This Is Not a Crisis. It's The New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, why this moment is particularly urgent, and how we can best communicate that without screaming OMG PLEASE HELP over and over. We also touch on our history and how our nonprofit model makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there: Letting us go deep, focus on underreported beats, and bring unique perspectives to the day's news.

You're here for reporting like that, not fundraising, but one cannot exist without the other, and it's vitally important that we hit our intimidating $390,000 number in online donations by June 30.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. It's going to be a nail-biter, and we really need to see donations from this specific ask coming in strong if we're going to get there.

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