Wednesday, Jan 11, 2012 11:01 AM Pacific Standard Time
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. That’s 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 MSNBC’s 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 O’Neill 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 McCain’s 2008 presidential bid, Matthews cut through the pious baloney in Mitt Romney’s 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. I’m 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 won’t release his tax returns?