{"id":15184,"date":"2008-04-11T15:55:10","date_gmt":"2008-04-11T19:55:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/archives\/15184.html"},"modified":"2008-04-11T15:55:10","modified_gmt":"2008-04-11T19:55:10","slug":"last-week-it-was-bowling-this-week-its-orange-juice","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/last-week-it-was-bowling-this-week-its-orange-juice\/","title":{"rendered":"Last week, it was bowling; this week it’s orange juice"},"content":{"rendered":"

Look, I know it must be tough for the media personalities. It’s been a slow week on the campaign trail, and we’re still about two weeks away from the Pennsylvania primary. As Dayo Olopade noted<\/a> the other day, the gap has created “a ‘news’ vacuum that has essentially forced the national media into a sort of 1950s, pre-technological childhood, playing Sputnik with an old refrigerator carton.”<\/p>\n

This week, on “Hardball,” the old refrigerator carton became a trip to a diner.<\/p>\n

Just about 24 hours ago, John Cole noted<\/a>: “I watch Hardball daily because I am a masochist, and I just learned from Chris Matthews that Obama ‘doesn’t do diners good’ and doesn’t make that ‘regular connection.’ Additionally, Matthews was mortified that Obama, when offered a coffee, declined and asked for an orange juice. Kill me now. A couple more Hardball episodes and I may have to collapse the media and assholes categories into one all-encompassing category.”<\/p>\n

I thought maybe John was exaggerating. I’ll never doubt him again<\/a>.<\/p>\n

<\/param><\/param><\/embed><\/object> <\/p>\n

It hurts. It really hurts.
\n
\nFor those of you who can’t watch<\/a> videos online:<\/p>\n

On the April 10 edition of MSNBC’s Hardball, after reporting that Sen. Barack Obama “campaigned today in northern Indiana, shaking hands and chatting with people at a diner near South Bend,” MSNBC correspondent David Shuster stated to host Chris Matthews: “Well, here’s the other thing that we saw on the tape, Chris, is that, when Obama went in, he was offered coffee, and he said, ‘I’ll have orange juice.’ ” Matthews replied, “No,” to which Shuster responded: “He did.” Shuster continued: “And it’s just one of those sort of weird things. You know, when the owner of the diner says, ‘Here, have some coffee,’ you say, ‘Yes, thank you,’ and, ‘Oh, can I also please have some orange juice, in addition to this?’ You don’t just say, ‘No, I’ll take orange juice,’ and then turn away and start shaking hands.” Matthews added, “You don’t ask for a substitute on the menu,” and then said: “David, what a regular guy. You could do this. … I mean, go to the diners.” Matthews then began an interview with Sen. Bob Casey (D-PA), an Obama supporter, by asking Casey: “Isn’t that interesting, Senator Casey, that Barack Obama, your candidate, can walk before 15,000 people with complete calm and assurance, but he seems a little out of place in A) a bowling alley and B) a diner? What is the problem with your guy?”<\/p>\n

Earlier in his discussion with Shuster, Matthews asserted that Obama is “not that good at that — handshaking in a diner,” adding: “Barack doesn’t seem to know how to do that right.” Shuster agreed, stating: “He doesn’t do that well.” Matthews then asserted: “What’s so hard about doing a diner? I don’t get it. Why doesn’t he go in there and say, ‘Did you see the papers today? What do you think about that team? How did we do last night?’ Just some regular connection?” Matthews also asked Shuster, referring to Obama’s support among college students versus support for Sen. Hillary Clinton: “So you think the college crowd can beat the regular people there, if it comes down to that, in terms of Hillary’s support?”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And people wonder why I’ve sworn off television news.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Look, I know it must be tough for the media personalities. It’s been a slow week on the campaign trail, and we’re still about two weeks away from the Pennsylvania primary. As Dayo Olopade noted the other day, the gap has created “a ‘news’ vacuum that has essentially forced the national media into a sort […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15184","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15184","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15184"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15184\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15184"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15184"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15184"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}