I hate myself for tuning in HARDBALL every day. As a matter of fact, I am so ashamed of this vile habit that I attempt to hide it from my family in exactly the same skulking fashion that my Uncle Glen, the model of Southern rectitude, used to stash bottles of scotch in the laundry hamper. Yet, with the same ingenuity borne of compulsion and desperation exhibited by my late Uncle, I somehow manage to tune in for my daily fix, only to find myself disgusted by the sophomoric rantings of this arrested adolescent, while simultaneously knowing that people like me are facilitating -- if not outright enabling -- the destruction of our American democracy.
There must be some sort of 12-Step program!
St. Francis once said, "Self-disgust is the beginning of conversion." If this be true, then there is hope for people like me, along with other classes of miscreant voyeurs in our media age who delight in gawking at the 21st-century equivalent of a train wreck. But the sad truth is that anything short of a mass conversion on the scale of Constantine the Great will have little effect in stopping the juggernaut which threatens the very underpinning of representative democracy in America. While lobbyists and special interests and arcane judicial arguments equating campaign contributions with free speech have done their part to undermine democracy, nothing has proved so insipid and so effective in rendering our political institutions moribund as the emergence of a class of professional political pundits.
The scales fell from my eyes when I heard Matthews state again yesterday that Mike Huckabee, of all people, should play "grown-up politics". The irony of this pronouncement was simply too obvious to pass over, especially when the perpetually snidely Craig Crawford reiterated the chorus and lauded negative campaigning as one of the great tools of politics.
If by "grown-up" Matthews means submitting to interrogations by hectoring, bombastic commentators asking the most inane, parochial questions and demanding immediate terse answers in a ten-second format, then I plead guilty to childishness. What passes for adult behavior in his milieu, apparently, is the very sort of behavior for which I was punished back in the day. My parents and teachers called it impertinent, presumptuous, low-class and, most devastating for us, "white trash".
Yet Matthews did not invent this style of journalism. He only perfected it.
The truth is there exists now in our country a whole class of media pundits who presume themselves to be celebrities on a par with those they claim to cover. They arrogantly interject themselves into the political process in a very personal way, as if their status as journalists makes them every bit as able and as powerful as the nabobs and potentates they follow.
Gone are the days of Lawrence Spivak and the panels of hard-boiled print journalists who presented reasoned, well-researched questions to politicians, then waited patiently for the response before asking a follow-up question.
In much the same way as there exists a revolving door between public service and political lobbying, the incestuous relationship between journalism and the emerging class of professional campaign consultants has insured that retail politics will be a freak show from now to eternity.
Reform will come hard, if at all, for the same reason that the phalanx of parasitic accountants, lawyers and business institutions guarantee that no meaningful overhaul to the arcane tax code will ever be effected.
There is very little difference between Mark Penn and Joe Trippe, or Matalin and Carville for that matter. The game has devolved into a perpetual cycle of point/counterpoint chasing the next hourly newscast, and the platonic ideal of an informed electorate has become the first casualty of the New Age.
Seasoned, thoughtful, cerebral voices like Eric Severeid's have been replaced by self-indulgent, narcissistic and blissfully ignorant voices like the aforementioned Matthews, Tim Russert, and a host of others too numerous to cite here.
I am certain most of this can be traced, in one way or another, back to the days of John McLaughlin and the Braden/Buchanan Report. But those shoutfests seem like public house debating societies by today's standards, and Pat Buchanan is a veritable Rhodes scholar with a portfolio of reasoned opinions when he is compared to the current crop of "shoot-from-the-hip" journalists.
They claim to have an intimate knowledge of the political process, yet their prognostications are notoriously inaccurate and their observations are often parochial. Again, I must cite Matthews as a particularly egregious example of this. On Thursday he required his round table to rate the responses of the various candidates to the news of the Bhutto assassination.
Now that's edifying! And that's class...
I am reminded of the wonderful scene in CITIZEN KANE where Charles Foster Kane is confronted by his blackmailer Boss Jim Gettys
Charles: This gentleman was saying...
Boss Jim Gettys: I'm not a gentleman. [To Emil] Your husband's only trying to be funny calling me one. I don't even know what a gentleman is. You see, my idea of a gentleman...Well, Mrs. Kane, if I owned a newspaper and I didn't like the way somebody was doing things, some politician say, I'd fight him with everything I had. Only I wouldn't show him in a convict's suit with stripes so his children could see the picture in the paper, or his mother.
The old political bosses like Daley, Pendergast and Tweed may have been thugs and mobsters, but they were at least authentic and possessed their own consistent ethical code. This new electronic brand of machine politics masquerades as cosmopolitan, sophisticated and informed; but it is every bit as strong-armed as the grammar school bully who demands your lunch money.
There will never be civil discourse in our American politics until guys like me recognize that we are powerless over Chris Matthews, that our lives have become unmanageable...