Past performance is no guarantee of future results:
President Obama “obviously likes giving speeches more than he does running the executive branch,” Chris Matthews said tonight.
Yes, you read that right: The MSNBC host who in 2008 felt a “thrill going up my leg” after hearing Obama speak has grown disenchanted. Tonight’s episode of Hardball saw Matthews delivering a rare, unforgiving grilling of the president as severe as anything that might appear on Fox News.
“What part of the presidency does Obama like? He doesn’t like dealing with other politicians — that means his own cabinet, that means members of the congress, either party. He doesn’t particularly like the press…. He likes to write the speeches, likes to rewrite what Favreau and the others wrote for the first draft,” Matthews said.
“So what part does he like? He likes going on the road, campaigning, visiting businesses like he does every couple days somewhere in Ohio or somewhere,” Matthews continued. “But what part does he like? He doesn’t like lobbying for the bills he cares about. He doesn’t like selling to the press. He doesn’t like giving orders or giving somebody the power to give orders. He doesn’t seem to like being an executive.”
On Tuesday’s program, Matthews similarly called Obama “a ship with the engine off.”
— “Chris Matthews sours on Obama,” the Politico, yesterday.
CHRIS MATTHEWS: The problem is there are people in this country, I don’t know the number maybe 10 percent, maybe 20 percent on a bad day, who want this president to have an asterisk next to his name in the history books, that he really wasn’t president. You know, like a guy in baseball who used drugs. They want to be able to say you know, he really didn’t have that batting average. He really wasn’t really the first African-American president. He really didn’t do healthcare. He really didn’t kill Bin-Laden. There’s an asterisk. They’ve been fighting like that, people like Donald Trump, since day one, they can’t stand the idea that he is president. And a piece of it is racism. Not that somebody in one racial group doesn’t like somebody in another race or group, so what. It is the sense the white race must rule. That’s what racism is. And they can’t stand the idea that a man who is not white is president. That is real. That sense of racial superiority and rule is in the hearts of some people in this country. Not all conservatives. Not even all right wingers. But it always come through with this birther crap and the other references and somehow trying to erase Obamacare, erase his record in history and a big part of it is bought into by people like John Boehner who is not a bad guy but he knows the only way to talk to the hard right is talk their language.
AL SHARPTON: No doubt about it.
— Chris Matthews, talking to Al Sharpton on their network home, MSNBC, as quoted in “Matthews: White Supremacy Heart of Opposition to Obama,” the Washington Free Beacon, yesterday.
Having committed thoughtcrime, will Matthews be forced to testify against himself as a radical agent of Emmanuel Goldstein? Let the Howard Kurtz-style showtrials begin in Media Oceania!
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