May 18, 2007

John McCain Hasn’t Voted in Five Weeks. Seriously

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Back in April we noted that John McCain had been too busy straight-talking on the campaign trail to vote on important legislation on Iraq. Turns out — and this is kind of insane — McCain hasn’t voted since.

Yeah, that’s right. McCain has gone five straight weeks without casting a vote in the Senate — he’s missed 43 straight votes. If he misses the next three votes, he’ll have been absent for 50 percent of the votes in the 110th Congress.

And this isn’t an inevitable product of running for president. Hillary Clinton has missed just 1.8 percent of the votes this year and Barack Obama has missed 6.4 percent.

What makes this all the more remarkable is that McCain is the only candidate in Congress who has done this before. He ran for president in 2000! He should know how to do it without looking like an idiot with an absentee problem. What on earth must the people of Arizona think?

Lord knows we aren’t huge McCain fans around here, but good heavens John, you’re better than this.

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THE FACTS SPEAK FOR THEMSELVES.

At least we hope they will, because that’s our approach to raising the $350,000 in online donations we need right now—during our high-stakes December fundraising push.

It’s the most important month of the year for our fundraising, with upward of 15 percent of our annual online total coming in during the final week—and there’s a lot to say about why Mother Jones’ journalism, and thus hitting that big number, matters tremendously right now.

But you told us fundraising is annoying—with the gimmicks, overwrought tone, manipulative language, and sheer volume of urgent URGENT URGENT!!! content we’re all bombarded with. It sure can be.

So we’re going to try making this as un-annoying as possible. In “Let the Facts Speak for Themselves” we give it our best shot, answering three questions that most any fundraising should try to speak to: Why us, why now, why does it matter?

The upshot? Mother Jones does journalism you don’t find elsewhere: in-depth, time-intensive, ahead-of-the-curve reporting on underreported beats. We operate on razor-thin margins in an unfathomably hard news business, and can’t afford to come up short on these online goals. And given everything, reporting like ours is vital right now.

If you can afford to part with a few bucks, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones with a much-needed year-end donation. And please do it now, while you’re thinking about it—with fewer people paying attention to the news like you are, we need everyone with us to get there.

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