The Harder He Blows
From our April issue (full content): It may sound strange to ask what’s happened to Chris Matthews. But in recent months, he’s been even worse than usual. No. We’re serious.
By Todd Gitlin
Web Exclusive: 03.23.06
Chris Matthews blows hard. This may sound less like a news flash than a crashing redundancy. And it’s true that yelling is nothing new for the omnipresent MSNBC/CNBC barking head, for whom picking up the pace and pumping up the volume almost always substitute for picking apart the fairy tales that keep the Bush White House intact. But in recent months Matthews’ obsequiousness toward his favorites and nastiness toward his bêtes noires have ballooned to new proportions. He’s told Tom DeLay, for instance, “You are not in this business for the money,” and said about incoming House Majority Leader John Boehner, “You can see this man’s greatness,” while declaring that the country went Republican in the 1994 elections because it was “tired of Hillary Clinton’s, you know ‘I’m going to run the country’ mentality.” As the faith-based bubble of George W. Bush goes on veering away from reality -- even from reality as seen by many conservative politicians -- Matthews, weirdly, is having trouble disengaging, with the one (important) exception of Iraq....
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Matthews has a visceral love for tough guys with the common touch, as opposed to creepy wimps like Al Gore, who, he said in 2000, “would lick the bathroom floor to be president” and “doesn’t look like one of us. He doesn’t seem very American, even.” Contrast Matthews on Bush: “Sometimes it glimmers with this man, our president, that kind of sunny nobility,” he said to Washington Times editorial-page editor and former Newt Gingrich minion Tony Blankley.
Matthews always knows who the good guys are. They’re mainly Republican. To Chertoff on January 5, four months after Hurricane Katrina, he oozed, “You’re doing a great job.” To former Bush oil crony, campaign manager, and Commerce Secretary Don Evans, who had just admired the president’s “really straight talk” in the State of the Union address, Matthews cooed: “You’re one of the good guys. We all like you here. You’re great. We wish you were back in Washington because you’re a very civil kind of guy, and you’re bipartisan, and everybody likes you, and we could use you here in Washington again.” “Who knows, who knows?” said Evans. “Be sure to say hello to
Kathleen for us.” Matthews: “I will. And maybe you’ll be chief of staff one of these days.” When Democrats are civil, he baits them for mushiness....
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Matthews sometimes gets fairness points for having once been a Democrat. An expired party card is a useful deflector when critics observe that his guests, his animus, and his vulgarity generally tilt right. As Ronald Reagan discovered long ago, when General Electric’s money was being passed around, a Democrat is something to have been way back when, and to have been born again from. It helps a hardball player get away with throwing beanballs.
Todd Gitlin is a professor of journalism and sociology at Columbia University and the author, most recently, of The Intellectuals and the Flag. Elizabeth Spellmire, Nelson Harvey, and Media Matters for America helped with research for this article.
http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?section=root&name=ViewWeb&articleId=11345
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