Salon: "The two Chris Matthews"
The two Chris Matthews
The easily derided MSNBC host scores the best hit of primary night coverage -- then quickly returns to hackdom
By David Daley
http://www.salon.com/2012/01/11/the_two_chris_matthews/singleton/
The derisive, duck-snort Ha! that announces the Sideshow segment on Hardball might be Chris Matthews actual laugh, or a sample of the Darrell Hammond Saturday Night Live impression. Thats apt, because with Matthews, it is always hard to find the line between reality and parody.
If there are a half-dozen Brian Williams laughs, there are more Chris Matthews personalities and they were all on display during MSNBCs coverage of the New Hampshire primary last night. It was an enraged and often electrifying performance the over-the-top outraged citizen, the partisan happy warrior, the loony carnival barker who yearns to be taken seriously, the entertainer trying to convince us Chuck Todd or Michael Steele has an original insight, the Washington insider happy to scrape before the likes of Eugene Robinson and Jonathan Alter all at once.
Matthews unhinged passion and needy insecurity, of course, is what makes him subject to satire in the first place. Good Chris is the former Tip ONeill aide with a strong sense of right and wrong. Bad Chris is the blowhard relentlessly pushing his book you know, the one he wrote all by himself. But in a devastating exchange with Steve Schmidt, who ran John McCains 2008 presidential bid, Matthews cut through the pious baloney in Mitt Romneys victory speech the meaningless but endlessly repeated red meat about European socialism and Democratic envy of rich people with a wicked acuity.
I just want to ask a question of Steve Schmidt. Im trying to put all this together, the rhetoric and the position of the candidate, Matthews said, according to the MSNBC transcript. He used phrases tonight like politics of envy against the Democrats. And I assume against some of his own party people there, like Newt Gingrich, the resentment of success. Is this why he wont release his tax returns?
provis99
(13,062 posts)No one gets into discussions about Lawrence O'Donnell or Tamron Hall that way.
Personally, I think Matthews runs hot and cold simply because he's enthusiastic and gregarious; he likes praising people, he just does it in a hyperbolic Philadelphia way.
I also tend to find his man-crushes pretty funny.
EC
(12,287 posts)but on another forum that I'm on at work to watch MSNBC all day, they talk about Tamron all the time. They really love her, but some of their remarks are really over the top.
The Velveteen Ocelot
(115,900 posts)he's a complete idiot - blurts out bizarre remarks like he has no filter in his brain. I hate the way he talks over his guests. He asks a question and before the other person has even halfway finished their answer he starts jabbering over them with his opinion. And the Salon article nails it about how he keeps pimping his book.
Mosaic
(1,451 posts)He moves whatever way the political winds blow. His family is conservative, he always reminds us, but he has deep respect for African Americans, having worked in Africa, and hates neocons, so he's not all bad. On the smears on European Socialism I wrote about this on my blog, I think what the small minded, childlike conservatives are afraid of is seeing topless women at the beach like in Europe, that's why they really hate 'socialism'.