Those of us who love Chris Matthews have to rate this near the apex of our Top Ten Matthews Moments list. In the unlikely event you missed it:[insert Youtube of Matthews humiliating a random wingnut radio talk show host on the word "appeasement]
[...]Now for the “full disclosure.”
I have more reasons than most to love Chris Matthews. When I first met him, thirty or so years ago, his hair was a different color, he was skinnier, and his neckties were more random, but he was otherwise pretty much the same political jabber machine he is today. The biggest difference is that back then I was able to spend ten hours a week listening to him talk without recourse to electronic gadgetry. Nowadays that pleasure requires the use of a television set.
Right, yeah. Whatever. I guess it's fine that the country was held hostage to a group of elites' religious differences. But this is where it gets good:In my opinion, Chris went kind of haywire during the Clinton years. I have my own theories about why. Theory one: he and Clinton are too much alike. Same age, same size, same crazed gregariousness, same gift of gab, same manic energy, same thirst for attention, roughly similar political views and non-élite backgrounds. (A similar this-town-ain’t-big-enough-for-both-of-us dynamic, this one focussing on rival good-ol’-boy personae, poisoned the relationship between Howell Raines, then the editorial page of the Times, and Clinton. In my opinion.) Civil wars are always the bitterest.
Theory two: it had something to do with the difference between Irish Catholic and Southern Baptist views of sin and forgiveness. As many people noticed at the time, the Lewinsky brouhaha drove not just Chris but also Michael Kelly, Tim Russert, and Maureen Dowd completely round the bend. For the Catholics, sins are to be confessed in the privacy of a closed booth to a priest who is the bottom rung on a ladder of long-established authority that runs upward through the hierarchy, the Pope, the saints, and only then to the Supreme Judge of the Universe. Forgiveness is administered via prescribed rituals sanctified by centuries of uninterrupted use. For low-church Protestants like Clinton (and Jimmy Swaggart and Jim Bakker), confession usually comes after you get caught, is noisily public, and is so bound up with high-profile damage control that its sincerity cannot be assumed.
The fact that he voted for Bush notwithstanding, of course.
Chris was a mildly conservative Democrat when I met him, and he still is. His Lewinsky-era anti-Clintonism built ratings for “Hardball,” but I don’t believe for a moment that it was a calculated or cynical move. Chris was quite clearly against the Iraq War when that position was unpopular with Americans in general and cable blowhards in particular. Yes, he is prone to hyperbole. Yes, he is apt to tell a guest that he or she is a “great American” whose current collection of ill-researched columns is “a great book.” Yes, his obsession with cultural-populist tropes, especially the horseshit assumption that the ideal male, maybe even the default human being, is a fortyish white non-intellectual in a baseball cap holding a can of beer, is annoying at best. Yes, the internal censor that keeps most peoples’ ids in check functions rather intermittently in his case. But that reckless freedom of his yields at least as many brilliant connections and startling metaphors as it does howlers. And his “liberal” outbursts are at least as numerous as his “conservative” ones, and maybe more heartfelt. Admittedly, I don’t have a file full of examples at hand. Nor are there any among the three hundred and fifty-two items in Media Matters’ Matthews dossier. (The clip at the top of this post, for example, doesn’t make the cut.) But it’s my impression, subjective and biased by friendship though it may be, that, certainly in the past five years or so, Matthews has been considerably tougher on the right than on the left. He was fierce on the Swift Boat slanderers. And on the war he has been magnificent.
Chris Matthews is a net plus for American politics and American society. If he decides to pack it in and run for office, I plan to max out.You know, I hear a lot about the need for change in our politics --- that we need to turn the page and inject the system with some new blood. And I hear a lot of it from allegedly liberal pundits like Hertzberg and Matthews who, without irony, tell tales of their earlier flights on Carter's Airforce One and recount their adventures in the Reagan years and the crazed politics of the 90s. And it never occurs to anybody that it's the liberal punditocrisy that's stale and tired and most in need of changing.