June 2, 1997

Washington Squares

Each week until July 14, MoJo Wire lets you test your prowess with political trivia and 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: Bill Clinton

Bill ClintonHe’s made the big time now: cruising around on Air Force I, hosting coffees left and right, and dealing with tons of fun and exciting scandals. But Bill Clinton’s roots are from a humbler place. Arkansas — a land of rambling dirt roads, the sprawling Ozarks, yipping hillbillies, and big ‘ol watermelons. After living his first seven years in the optimistic town Hope, Clinton spent his formative years in tingly Hot Springs, Arkansas. The town, Clinton’s own mother, Virginia Kelley wrote in her memoir Leading With my Heart, was a place “where gangsters were cool, and rules were made to be bent, and money and power — however you got them — were the total measure of a man.”

It’s all starting to make sense now, isn’t it?

Slick Willie has been been srcutinized since 1992, but how much do you really know about the man?

  1. What was Clinton’s goal at Oxford?

    To meet the Beatles and have a jam session.
    To visit Winston Churchill’s Grave.
    To read 100 books per term.
    To try marijuana.
    To put on the necessary 30 pounds of body fat and swim the English Channel.

  2. What was Clinton’s eleventh grade science project?

    He put 100 frogs in a series of smaller and smaller boxes to illustrate the effects of overpopulation.
    He slapped a raw hot dog on a shiny sheet of metal and called it a solar hot dog cooker.
    He tested the effects of alcohol on the ability of mice to find their way through a maze, and then repeated the experiment on himself and a classmate.
    He used fans and a wash basin to make a scale model of the Bermuda Triangle and tried to determine why it was so dangerous.
    He made a play-dough city, complete with inhabitants, and melted in under a heat lamp to protest the nuclear arms race.

  3. What is one of Clinton’s all time favorite books?

    Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.
    Darrell Huff’s How to Lie With Statistics.
    Vladimer Lenin’s What Is to Be Done?.
    Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying
    James Agee and Walker Evans’ Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.

  4. What were the first words Hillary Rodham heard Bill Clinton speak, as she passed through the student lounge at Yale Law School?

    “And Paula cooked me breakfast, too!”
    “That Professor Bork sure is conservative.”
    “And not only that, we grow the biggest watermelons in the world.”
    “I just met this second-year student, Clarence Thomas. He’s got the biggest collection of pornos you ever saw!”
    “Then I started coughing and choking. I couldn’t inhale at all. It was awful.”

  5. What did Bill and Hillary do for their honeymoon?

    They went to Acapulco, along with Hillary’s parents and brothers.
    They organized anti-war demonstrations in Beijing.
    They went to Niagara Falls, Ontario, with some draft dodging friends.
    They bought a 30-day “Americruiser” pass from Greyhound.
    They went nude sun-bathing in the south of France.

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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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