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><font color=red>FREE</font color></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: Ross Perot

Ross PerotTexas businessman H. Ross Perot assembled one of the most surprising presidential campaigns of the 1990s. Perot’s unorthodox approach mixed grass-roots networking with expensive media exposure and earned him an auspicious 20 million votes in 1992. By 1996, however, his support in the polls had dropped by more than half.

The man who’s been called a “hand grenade with a bad haircut” has been uncharacteristically quiet amid the recent federal budget debates, offering nary a sound bite, much less one of his infamous infomercials. Is Perot’s recent silent treatment a strategic wait-in-the-wings, or are his political days finally over?

  1. Perot once described Washington, D.C., as a town…

    with “a broken arm.”
    full of people who “shoot off Roman candles.”
    “just like my Texarkana backyard.”
    just “like a crazy aunt we keep down in the basement.”
    whose “alabaster city gleams, undimmed by human tears.”

  2. What reason did Perot give for leaving the U.S. Navy?

    He was sick of “godless…drunken tales of moral emptiness.”
    Too much of a job and not enough of an adventure.
    Chronic seasickness.
    Tired of hanging around with a “bunch of plain people.”
    It was a “brutal, dirty, thankless job.”

  3. What did Perot predict would happen with the passage of NAFTA?

    It would “increase the chances that the Japanese would try to export sushi and data chips.”
    It would “turn Washington into a town where they tell fairy tales, have little Chinese fire drills, and play Lawrence Welk music.”
    It would “not affect me at all.”
    It would “worsen the water quality in Little Rock. That place is full of $40-a-month flophouses with spiders runnin’ up the ceiling and brown water comin’ outa the kitchen sink.”
    It would “create a giant sucking sound as American jobs went to Mexico.”

  4. What is a favorite Perot-ian phrase?

    “These people work for us.”
    “The deficit is a wave we can’t ride.”
    “PACs are politically asinine crooks.”
    “Playing defense, not offense.”
    “It’s just that simple.”

  5. Journalist Robert Fitch once called Perot “America’s first _______.”

    nouveau riche billboard
    welfare billionaire
    pint-sized robber baron
    tele-populist
    zealot tycoon

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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 CAME UP SHORT.

We just wrapped up a shorter-than-normal, urgent-as-ever fundraising drive and we came up about $45,000 short of our $300,000 goal.

That means we're going to have upwards of $350,000, maybe more, to raise in online donations between now and June 30, when our fiscal year ends and we have to get to break-even. And even though there's zero cushion to miss the mark, we won't be all that in your face about our fundraising again until June.

So we urgently need this specific ask, what you're reading right now, to start bringing in more donations than it ever has. The reality, for these next few months and next few years, is that we have to start finding ways to grow our online supporter base in a big way—and we're optimistic we can keep making real headway by being real with you about this.

Because the bottom line: Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism Mother Jones exists to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. We really need to see if we'll be able to raise more with this real estate on a daily basis than we have been, so we're hoping to see a promising start.

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