This is really beginning to creep me out.
Chris Matthews can't seem to stop drooling over Barack Obama.
In January 2008 while appearing as a guest on the Tonight Show, Matthews told Jay Leno of how awestruck he was by Barack Obama.
MATTHEWS: If you're actually in a room when he gives one of those speeches and you don't cry, you're not an American.
...I know we're supposed to be dispassionate, but I can describe it.
...When you're in a room with the guy, you feel great about this country. You feel like we can make it better. We can transit to something bigger and better.
And the race thing, I know it's always going to be around us, at least it seems that way, but this guy seems like he can... 'cause he's come from a white family and a black family, and he's married to a black woman.
And they're cool people. They are really cool. They're Jack and Jackie Kennedy when you see them together. They are cool. And they're great looking and they're cool, and they're young and they're... Everything seems to be great. I know I'm selling him now. I'm not supposed to sell...
If you're in [a room] with Obama, you feel the spirit moving. Now, I'm selling too much.
It gets worse.
About a month after that, Matthews felt something more than the spirit moving. He discussed having a physcial reaction when he heard Obama speak.
During MSNBC's coverage of the Potomac Primary, Matthews told a national, albeit small, television audience about his physical reaction to Obama.
MATTHEWS: I have to tell you, you know, it's part of reporting this case, this election, the feeling most people get when they hear Barack Obama's speech. My, I felt this thrill going up my leg. I mean, I don't have that too often.
That is weird.
Yesterday, when Obama delivered his speech on his spiritual mentor Rev. Jeremiah Wright and race, Matthews completely fell apart.
I really think Matthews has lost it. In his view, Obama's speech was up there with Lincoln's Gettysburg Address.
When introducing Hardball, Matthews said Obama's speech was "worthy of Abraham Lincoln."
MATTHEWS: Did Barack Obama distance himself enough from Rev. Wright? Did he calm the fears of the white voter? How did the speech play? We'll have much more on this momentous day and what I personally view as the best speech ever given on race in this country, one that went beyond the "I Have a Dream" to "I have lived the dream but have also lived in this country."
MATTHEWS: I think this is the kind of speech I think first graders should see, people in the last year of college should see before they go out in the world. This should be, to me, an American tract. Something that you just check in with, now and then, like reading Great Gatsby and Huckleberry Finn. Read this speech, once in a while, ladies and gentlemen. This is us. It's us with the scab ripped off.
It's white people talking the way they do when they're alone with other white people, some people. It's black people talking the way they are when there's no white people around. It's an honest statement from a guy who comes from both backgrounds. We have never heard anything like this.
MATTHEWS: Will it cost him the nomination? We'll talk about the politics of all this and whether voters will be convinced by what many of us think is one of the great speeches in American history, and we watch a lot of them.
Link: sevenload.com
Chris Matthews has really gone off the deep end. Truly bizarre.
Obama's politically expedient, CYA, desperate attempt to prevent his candidacy from derailing because he chose a racist, hate-spewing pastor as a spiritual mentor cannot be compared to the speeches of Abraham Lincoln or other great American orators like Martin Luther King.
To do so diminishes the greatness of Lincoln and King.
This isn't just Matthews having a thrill go up his leg. This is an indication of his utter cluelessness when it comes to American history.
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