First read the NYT scribe, sticking a sharp pin in that infernal gasbag Chris Matthews. Then read Digby's take to appreciate the full horror of it all

"Matthews may be the most ridiculously transparent of the Village idiots and scribes, but he is far from unique. The story isn't him, it's the sick culture that has nurtured him and allows people like him to flourish."
--Digby, in "Tears of a Clown," a commentary on the upcoming NYTMag profile of Chris Matthews (see below)

In this Sunday's New York Times Magazine, NYT reporter Mark Leibovich has a profile of MSNBC's Chris Matthews which stretches to (by my rough count) approximately 12 zillion words. It's already circulating online, and occasioning much comment. To my astonishment I read the whole damned thing straight through to the end, by which time it's hard not to think that the subject barely merited a 500-word thumbnail sketch.

For once it's not one of your usual NYTMag puff pieces. No indeed. While it's hardly a savage attack piece, the thing is, how do you write at length (and in, God help us, depth, or at least breadth) about our Chris without driving home the point, ad infinitum, that there's no there there? If you were to look up the word nonentity in the dictionary, you know whose picture you would expect to find there.

And yet the guy is a "player" in our rough-and-stumble game of politics. Which I guess is what the fascination is about. You wonder, are you missing something here? Does anyone take him seriously? (Well, he gets paid $5 million a year, so somebody must.) And the reality, as set forth in Leibovich's earnest and not overtly hostile account, is horribly depressing.

I'm not going to retrace the ground Leibovich covers. But I do have some favorite moments. Like this observation from someone who served in the Peace Corps with our Chris, who joined in 1968, the year after he graduated from college.

The following year, he was posted in Swaziland, in southeast Africa, where he taught business skills to villagers and rode around on a little Suzuki motorcycle. “He often wore a necktie,” recalls Fred O’Regan, a fellow volunteer.

“I remember we were out hitchhiking once,” O’Regan told me. Matthews started arguing about Nixon and Vietnam. “It was just like watching his show today. Chris would ask a question, then he would answer it himself and then the person was invited to comment on Chris’s answer to his own question.”

Our Chris exhibits a near-pathological obsession with himself. Poor Leibovich, in the course of his time with the great man, was treated to endless repetitions of the same cheesy self-promotional spiels. At the same time, the guy seems to have a truly cosmic lack of real-world self-awareness.

As I began researching this article, Jeremy Gaines, an MSNBC spokesman, gave me the names of about a dozen people that Matthews recommended I speak to, all famous--everyone from Nancy Pelosi to Marvin Hamlisch. But gatekeepers for more than one of these people expressed confusion as to why Matthews would refer me to them. “Please keep us out of this,” pleaded a spokesperson for one prominent politician whom Matthews had recommended via Gaines.

The other night I happened to be at a gathering of lots of serious progressive folk, and an unwatched TV was on, with the sound turned all the way down in the empty den. It was tuned to MSNBC, and with 8:00 (and Countdown) approaching, I was trying to figure out how to activate the closed captions. When another guest passed through and noticed Chris hardballing on-screen, I explained what I was trying to do, and he seemed relieved. "I don't like Chris Matthews," he said, and I pointed out that he's really much better when you can't hear him. But still not entirely bearable, as Leibovich points out:

It can be amusing if slightly painful to watch Matthews’s facial expressions and body language on the set of “Hardball” when others are talking; he will, at times, bounce in his seat like a Ritalin-deprived second-grader who is dying to give an answer but has been admonished too many times for interrupting. He appears to go through the same pained exercise in his own home. Indeed, as I learned at Sunday brunch there, the degree to which the cadences of the Matthews dining room mimic “Hardball” is striking.

One of Leibovich's recurring themes is that Matthews' contract expires in May, and there's serious question as to how serious NBC is about re-signing him, especially at his current pay level. (Can you believe he's actually paid $5 million a year? Read it for yourself. Hey, I'm not making this stuff up.)

“I have a lot of options,” Matthews told me. “I’m a free man starting next June.” There has been long-running speculation that Matthews could be a candidate to replace Bob Schieffer, whenever he retires, as the host of CBS’s Sunday morning show “Face the Nation.”

Now wait just a blamed second. "Long-running speculation that Matthews could be a candidate to replace Bob Schieffer"??? What??? You mean, speculation by people besides Chris Matthews? Okay, here is Bob Schieffer, and here is Chris Matthews. Is the theory that CBS will jump at the opportunity to put someone way dumber than the singularly classy (for his profession) Bob Schieffer in the Face the Nation chair?

Now, to Digby's take on the NYT piece:

I don't know if it's an accurate portrayal of Matthews or not but if it is he is even more of a cartoon character in real life than he is on his show. He fulfills every single Village media cliche: obsessive social climbing, deep personal insecurity, primitively sexist and racist and just plain dumb. It's so bad that I almost felt sorry for him by the end of it. In fact, it's so relentlessly damning it feels like piling on -- and nobody hates this guy more than I do.

What really cracks me up in the article is the extent to which people who are just as bad as he is in their own ways try to distance themselves from him.

Special scorn is deservedly reserved for Tim Russert, who--

is made to look positively statesmanlike in contrast to crazy Chris, for the single most shameful episode in his career: the Scooter Libby business. Please, if there is one time in his whole damned career that Matthews accidentally did some journalism it was when he intuited that Libby and Cheney were in the middle of the Plame scandal. Russert folded like a fading begonia when Scooter called him to give him what for and he was forced to admit under oath that he automatically puts all conversations with important people on background without them even asking. That's how he builds 'trust." With them. Not us.

In the end (and to return to where we started), depressing as it is to discover that our Chris may be an even emptier shell than we could have imagined, the big-picture reality--which Leibovich either doesn't see or doesn't wish to look into, for whatever reason(s)--is way more depressing. Listen again:

Matthews may be the most ridiculously transparent of the Village idiots and scribes, but he is far from unique. The story isn't him, it's the sick culture that has nurtured him and allows people like him to flourish.

Could it be said any better?

#