The Aria of Chris Matthews
By MARK LEIBOVICH
Published: April 13, 2008
This article will appear in this Sunday's Times Magazine.
(Olaf Blecker/NYT)
Senator Matthews? What next for the guy with all the ‘‘Hardball’’ questions — and answers? There is speculation that Matthews might challenge Senator Arlen Specter, the Pennsylvania Republican, when he runs for re-election in 2010.
....There is a level of ubiquity about Chris Matthews today that can be exhausting, occasionally edifying and, for better or worse, central to what has become a very loud national conversation about politics. His soothing-like-a-blender voice feels unnervingly constant in a presidential campaign that has drawn big interest, ratings and voter turnout. He gets in trouble sometimes and has to apologize — as he did after suggesting that Hillary Clinton owed her election to the Senate to the fact that her husband “messed around.” He is also something of a YouTube sensation: see Chris getting challenged to a duel by the former Georgia governor, Zell Miller; describing the “thrill going up my leg” after an Obama speech; dancing with (and accidentally groping) Ellen DeGeneres on her show; shouting down the conservative commentator Michelle Malkin; ogling CNBC’s Erin Burnett. And he has provided a running bounty of material for Media Matters for America, a liberal media watchdog, which has devoted an entire section of its Web site (“The Matthews Monitor”) to cataloging Matthews’s alleged offenses, especially against Hillary Clinton and women generally.
In addition to doing “Hardball,” Matthews is the host of a Sunday morning show on NBC, “The Chris Matthews Show,” has been a staple of the network’s coverage of presidential debates and has helped moderate two of them. He is also a frequent guest on NBC and MSNBC news shows and an ongoing spoof target on “Saturday Night Live.” It can be difficult not to hear Darrell Hammond’s long-running impression of Matthews when Matthews himself is speaking. Matthews, for his part, says he loves the Hammond impression and sometimes catches himself “doing Hammond doing Matthews.” If parody is an emblem of pop-culture status — signifying a measure of permanence — Matthews belongs on any Mount Rushmore of political screaming heads.
Matthews is as pure a political being as there is on TV. He is the whip-tongued, name-dropping, self-promoting wise guy you often find in campaigns, and in the bigger offices on Capitol Hill or K Street. (“Rain Man,” NBC’s Brian Williams jokingly called Matthews, referring to his breadth of political knowledge.) He wrote speeches for Jimmy Carter, worked as a top advisor to Tip O’Neill, ran unsuccessfully for Congress himself in his native Philadelphia at 28. In an age of cynicism about politics, Matthews can be romantic about the craft, defensive about its practitioners and personally affronted when someone derides Washington or “the game.” He can also be unsparing in his criticism of those who run afoul of his “take.” “I am not a cheerleader for politics per se,” Matthews says. “I am a cheerleader for the possibilities of politics.”
This election season, MSNBC has placed great emphasis on politics, devoting 28 percent of its airtime to the subject last year (compared with 15 percent for Fox News and 12 percent for CNN, according to the Project for Excellence in Journalism)....As Matthews is clearly a signature figure on the network, and one of the most recognizable political personalities on the air, this has been something of a heyday for him. Yet for as basic as he has become to the political and media furniture, Matthews is anything but secure. He is of the moment, but, at 62, also something of a throwback — to an era of politics set in the ethnic Democratic wards of the ’60s and the O’Neill-Reagan battles of the ’80s. And he is a product of an aging era of cable news, the late-’90s, when “Hardball” started and Matthews made his name as a battering critic of Bill Clinton during the Monica saga.
Cable political coverage has changed, however, and so has the sensibility that viewers — particularly young ones — expect from it....
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/13/magazine/13matthews-t.html?ei=5087&em=&en=a8cf6d3fa8aeddf4&ex=1207972800&pagewanted=all
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