Matthews makes distinction between blacks, college educated, and ‘regular people’

April 2, 2008

Earlier this week, obsessing over Barack Obama’s bowling excursion, Chris Matthews told MSNBC political analyst Michelle Bernard, “You know, Michelle — and this gets very ethnic, but the fact that he’s good at basketball doesn’t surprise anybody, but the fact that he’s that terrible at bowling does make you wonder.”

It was, of course, an incredibly odd thing to say. First, it’s not at all clear why we should “wonder” about someone who’s a bad bowler. And second, it certainly sounded as if Matthews — while getting “ethnic” — believes black people are necessarily good at basketball.

With this one under his belt, Matthews decided to dabble in some more bizarre racial talk again yesterday.

For those who can’t watch clips online, Matthews asked Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-MO): “Let me ask you about how he — how’s he connect with regular people? Does he? Or does he only appeal to people who come from the African-American community and from the people who have college or advanced degrees?”

It’s hard to know where to start with something like this.

Let’s see, what’s the most offensive angle here:

a) that Matthews makes a distinction between the African-American community and those with college degrees; or

b) that Matthews believes only whites with high school diplomas qualify as “regular people”?

And as long as we’re asking Matthews-related questions, here’s another: how does this guy stay on the air?

I know a lot of people want to watch clips but can’t from their work computers, so here’s the transcript of the relevant exchange, as per the fine folks at Media Matters. I’d just add that Matthews seemed rather nonchalant about what he was saying, as if it were perfectly reasonable.

MATTHEWS: Obama — that’s Senator Obama — has taken a different tone in Pennsylvania, where I’m at right now. He faces an aging blue-collar electorate, one of the oldest states. I think it’s the second oldest state, in terms of demographics. People want details about how he plans to improve their lives, keep their kids from moving out of the state, and creating jobs down the road for their grandkids. Can he win over working-class voters here in Pennsylvania? Senator Claire McCaskill of Missouri is an Obama supporter. Senator McCaskill, did you advise Obama to go out and try to bowl the other day?

McCASKILL: Well, listen, I grew up in a small town where you learned to do two things: You learned to bowl and you learned to roller-skate. I can’t wait to challenge him to a game of bowling.

MATTHEWS: OK. Let me ask you about how he — how’s he connect with regular people? Does he? Or does he only appeal to people who come from the African-American community and from the people who have college or advanced degrees?

McCASKILL: You know, I think people forget about how well Barack Obama is thought of in southern Illinois. I know southern Illinois. They’re our neighboring state. They’re very much like the people in many parts of rural Missouri. These are working people, salt-of-the-earth people. And if these people of Pennsylvania will give him a chance and listen to him, I think they will be surprised how much they’ll relate to him, both as a leader and as a person.

Matthews is being Matthews…a total nit. I am beyond being blown away by anything this guy says. He’s just so, vapid!

If you want to see a VERY funny bit on the pundits and this whole bowling thing, watch Jon Stewart take on the pundits.

http://www.thedailyshow.com/video/index.jhtml?videoId=165226&title=baracks-bowling-for-votes

  • It’s pretty clearly (b), because Matthews is obviously not drawing a distinction between African Americans and people with college degrees; he’s drawing distinctions between regular people/African Americans and regular people/people with college degrees. Obviously, the set of African Americans overlaps, but is not coextensive with, the set of college graduates, and nothing Matthews said suggests otherwise.

  • I see this all the time. What’s going on is that Matthews is referring to “regular people” because that’s his target audience. They are the marks for the advertisers, so he sucks up to them.

    The man is a moron, and everyone knows it, but he sells [Your Ad Here] so he stays on the air.

  • For Tweety, going after Obama because he is a member of the wine sipping, latte drinking, intellectual elite is a lot easier than going after him because he’s African-American although I expect Matthews will figure out a way to descend into covert racism fairly soon.

  • Yeah, you’re not a real reg’lar ‘murikin if you have melanin or higher education. And obviously the only people voting for Obama are eggheads and race-obsessed brown people.

    Remember, if you have cable/satellite you are helping to pay this asshole’s salary when you send in your monthly fee, whether you watch him or not.

  • A new poll shows that 68.2% of people 65 years and older get most of their parody from cable news channels. Of course 81.7% of all statistics are made up on the spot.

  • “how does this guy stay on the air?”

    You don’t get it. In a very real sense, he stays on the air precisely because of statements like this. IOW, he has no innate restraint or sense of what might be appropriate or inappropriate; he just immediately voices whatever pops into his head. It’s why he can — at times — provide a sense of how something may play politically, because he isn’t “analyzing” anything; he just voices his feelings. It’s also why he can be, at times, entertaining.

    At the same time, this leaves him prone to an endless stream of regrettable, uncomfortable, or outright deplorable comments. I don’t think there’s any real malice or racism there; he’s just like a big, overactive puppy, blundering around and breaking things.

  • Matthews is an idiot and I don’t give a shit whether or not a presidential candidate can bowl. Yes, those two statements are unrelated…except for the fact that they both happen to be true. We have clearly hit the middle of this long stretch to the Pennsylvania primary when this much time is wasted on Barack’s bowling score. Move along…nothing to see here…

    🙂

  • I think comparing Tweety to a puppy is being way too generous. He’s more like a simpering adolescent without any adult supervision and is way overdue to be sent to his room for a long time-out until he learns some manners.

    Really, it’s like his brain is completely disconnected from his mouth and he just flushes out any sewage that comes into his head and then laughs at his own cleverness. Too bad the stuff he flushes is neither funny nor clever.

  • 7. On April 2nd, 2008 at 4:50 pm, retr2327 said:

    I don’t think there’s any real malice or racism there; he’s just like a big, overactive puppy, blundering around and breaking things.

    He’s not a puppy. If he was, he’d be on Animal Planet, where “bark” would be more intelligible than the nonsense he spews on a regular basis. Fact is, he’s a man with the capacity to shape, even change, public perception. Instead of trying to be a regular guy to cater to his regular guy crowd (assuming his crowd even IS a regular guy crowd) he should try enlightening his audience with facts first, THEN try to be entertaining. One of the reasons this next generation appreciates and trusts Stewart & Colbert more than most real news programs is because they actually use facts first, then exaggerate to make comedic points, whereas Matthews, and his comparable ilk over on Fox, and Beck, use exaggerations to make their points, then hope to be entertaining on top of it. If you’ve got to exaggerate to make your point, news tip: Your point is invalid.

  • I don’t know about anyone else, but whenever I think of Matthews what comes to mind first is drug-addled. If I had to bet money on anyone on television being on a constant cocaine binge my guess would be Chris Matthews. The man shows all the signs.

  • Look, the White House has a bowling alley in the basement, so Obama can get as much practice as he wants once he’s elected.
    As a matter of fact, this should be part of his campaign, elect Obama so he can practice bowling!
    Maybe He and McCain could do a series of sports events: bowling, basketball, and shuffleboard. First man to break a hip loses.
    Then we can go get a beer with them, (but don’t let McCain suck you into a bar brawl) and we can all turn over and go back to sleep.

    Issues? Policies? Please don’t bother us with that crap, we have more important things to do!

  • Adolescent is a good depiction of Matthews. Did ya’ ever notice how much time he spends on his show, when he has 4 panelists and he should be acting like a moderator, pontfficating forth with his own opinions and cutting his guests out. (This is his fox network show on Sunday morning- I don’t have cable so I only help pay his salary when I buy a product that advertises with him.) The man loves to hear himself talk, and he is invariably the least intelligent of the five on stage at the time.

  • If Matthews has questions as to whether Obama can “connect” with non-African-American, non-college educated voters, I suggest he look at the primary results from the Deep South. He did pretty well there, I’d say. That’s what McCaskill thinks, too, apparently. (For those who don’t know, I swear the Deep South starts about 5 miles south of Champaign in Illinois.)

  • “He’s not a puppy. If he was, he’d be on Animal Planet, where “bark” would be more intelligible than the nonsense he spews on a regular basis. Fact is, he’s a man with the capacity to shape, even change, public perception.”

    Spewing nonsense on a regular basis does not, apparently, disqualify one from being President. Why should it disqualify some fool from having a TV show?

  • Matthews is using “regular people” as short hand for white, working class people, and I believe that white, working class people think of themselves as “regular people.” Minorities – regardless of their level of education – and the more highly educated – regardless of their race / ethnicity – are not part of the “regular” crowd. Nobody ever said Bush was the candidate with whom people most wanted to have a glass of wine or converse with over a latte. Matthews and Russert are both guilty of both exploiting their backgrounds in white, working class / middle class America. They tap nostalgia for a life that feels as if it is threatened or already gone. It still exists, but it is increasingly difficult to hang on to. Naturally, those who feel it slipping away from them seek the reason why and to place blame. One convenient scape goat are the “non-regular” people in our midst. Matthews over simplifies things, but there is a segment of the population for which that over-simplification seems real.

    I was a bit “out of the loop” when Obama went bowlling. Can anyone tell me WHY he went bowling? It seemed like a silly thing to do, and the media understands silly. They can’t be bothered to comprehend policy, but SILLY they get.

  • […] he’s just like a big, overactive puppy,[…] — retr2327

    If he were my puppy, I’d walk him more often, so he didn’t have to relieve himself on my living room carpet.

  • Obama was just on Hardball for the full hour and effectively demolished every question that came his way. The crowd was solidly behind him and Matthews looked impressed.

  • On April 2nd, 2008 at 4:34 pm, MsJoanne said: “Matthews is being Matthews…a total nit. I am beyond being blown away by anything this guy says. He’s just so, vapid!”

    And inane! Don’t forget abjectly inane. He’s such a creepy little jackass and he has all the emotional maturity of a four year old.

  • But It’s Okay For Barack Obama To Be Sexist?

    Knee-jerk liberals. You lean over backward to point out ANY INSTANCE of racism, but you just completely ignore sexism by Obama, his surrogates and his followers.

    JHC, WTF is wrong with you? I thought I’d seen the last of men who refused to come out of the cave re: women in the 60s and 70s. Nope. I guess not. I swear, it’s in your DNA to treat women as second class citizens. And as long as you let sexism continue, especially by Obama and his folks, you will have a hard time convincing ANY Clinton supporters that you “care” about us.

    Frankly, I’m beginning to think that my “liberal” brothers are “Just Words.”

  • […] you just completely ignore sexism by Obama, his surrogates and his followers. — Mabelle, @ 24

    Heh? Inform me, please. Specific instances would be appreciated. Hillary’s claims that she’s being bullied by the boys don’t count.

  • Just like they claim Marijuana is a gateway drug into hardcore drugs, Matthews is an ignorant gateway into more overt acts of racism. With his incompetence-led racial stupidity, we could find ourselves back in time a few decades when it was still acceptable to say “colored”.

  • obama was on the hardball college tour with mathews last night — it was a treat to watch him whack the puppy with a newspaper, albeit gently, like training the puppy not to pee on the carpet. mathews was way out of his league, and i think he knew it. in fact at one point, while obama was answering questions from the students, you could see mathews’ hands (paws) shaking, like he needed to be let outside. obama was extraordinary in his ability to connect with the crowd and give substanitive answers.

    http://hardblogger.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2008/04/02/852622.aspx

    i for one could give a shit if he can bowl — he for sure can lead.

  • Actually, I think you’re being a little harsh on Matthews. His seperate references to African Americans and people with college or advanced degrees probably have more to do with these groups being polling demographics that Obama does well in than a belief that they represent two mutually exclusive subsets.

    Matthews was not trying to attack Obama or degrade African-Americans. His intent did not seem to be negative. It is exactly this kind of hyper-sensitive nit-picking that makes discussions of racial issues so difficult in this country

  • Buzmon, get with it. Americans are looking for someone to enter the Whitehouse who is ready to bowl on day one.

  • I’m seeing a lot of irrelevant, unqualified admiration for Obama’s performace in the interview that preceded Matthew’s careless remark. I think you all are getting a little swept up in the man’s image. I like Obama a lot–he’s my number one pick for president–but his political rhetoric is starting to grate on me. His speeches are still brilliant, but in an interview/debate format, he just repeats stock answers with a lot of generalities. Case in point: on the gay marriage issue, Matthews asked something like “Even if you include all the rights, isn’t it discrimination to say ‘You can’t get married?'” Obama completely ignored the question and repeated the answer he had just given, about ensuring same-sex couples get the rights they deserve, playing on people’s emotions instead of being candid about his beliefs. I wish *someone* would ask the question of Obama using the term “separate but equal.” That might be enough of an alarm to wake him up and get him to stop skirting the issue.

  • Matthews is just really dumb. I used to think he was intentionally bombastic or had this or that agenda, but… nope. Just dumb.

  • I’m feeling oppositional. But salon’s coverage of Chris Matthews is starting to feel like a witch hunt. He’s vacuous–I get that. But how is his acknowledgment that there’s a perception that blacks and basketball go together different from, say, an anthropologist or sociologist or psychologist (I’m showing my ignorance by not knowing whose field this is!) publishing a paper in a scholarly journal that talks about how there’s a perception that blacks and basketball go together?

    Really. I’m asking.

    In a master’s level lit class recently, we discussed a short story laden with images and vocab about fat women–all the nasty slang you could think of, coming from and about fat fictional characters. Everyone waxed enthusiastically about the author’s sympathy for obese people and talked about how unforgiving and judgmental our culture is. And all I could think of was, If this–or parts of it–had been published by someone without the requisite liberal credentials, s/he would be mincemeat.

  • Matthews is part of MSNBC. He and Keith O. promote Obama all the time. Remember the crawling up his leg sensation he got after listening to one of Obama’s speeches (his words). He dislikes Hillary with an over the top passion. Obama had nothing to fear. It’s funny how guys like Matthews don’t know when to shut up.

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