Chris Matthews and Obama's News Conference

The thrill isn't gone for Chris Matthews. The honeymoon isn't over.



From Brad Wilmouth, NewsBusters:

CHRIS MATTHEWS: He was very precise, and I was very impressed with his amazing ability standing in front of the American people on a road block – by the way, you couldn’t find a channel hardly he wasn’t on tonight – a road block of American intention, and he was at his best intellectually. I thought it was a great example of how his mind works. And I think we’re going to have to know that the next four years, how’s he thinking on this thing?

KEITH OLBERMANN: ...You just hit on something here that’s almost, it’s half a question of style points and half a question that evokes the old Woody Allen joke about how people’s standards have been lowered systematically by television over the last 50 years. This is an entirely different experience for anybody who really perhaps only knew in their young lives President Bush, and didn’t know anything before that. This news conference in which a President will answer a multi-part question with a series of four different answers, all of them absolutely common sense-

MATTHEWS: Right.

OLBERMANN: -and also intellectual and will take seven minutes to answer them. Is this-

MATTHEWS: Right.

OLBERMANN: -is he going to adjust to where people were with George Bush’s, kind of, more truncated performance, or is he anticipating the democracy to be participatory and people are going to go in there – and, believe me, I’m the last person to criticize anybody for being expansive on television – but is he going to demand of, you know, citizens, to go along with him and listen for the whole seven minutes?"

MATTHEWS: Well, he’s asking us to touch on all the points and agree when he does that it’s worthwhile to do so. I think it was the difference in the old quiz shows between the $64,000 question when there was a multi-part question. By the way, some of that was rigged, obviously, but a multi-part question which required knowledge in a number of areas and you had to put it together as opposed to Jeopardy where you quickly give an answer. I think he showed his ability to go around the room with a flashlight to the question you put. You ask a question which is a holistic question. He goes, "Well, let me look at this part, that part." He does, what a mind he has, and I love his ability to do it on television. I love to think with him. I think the more we get through this thicket of economic quandary right now, the more we’re going to need to hear how our President’s going at it, and he showed us tonight.

This is embarrassing.

Matthews is a lapdog not a watchdog.