Chris Matthews’ short goodbye

IT’S A STANDING truism of our lives: Things happen fast after taking forever to happen at all. Chris Matthews knows this firsthand. The longtime student of and reporter on American politics is, lately, an accidental victim of the evolution of our sexual politics, and the way men and women relate to each other — the way we live now. Not all those halcyon years ago.

Matthews’ political program, Hardball, was for 20 years a program that hard-wired Washington’s cutthroat political culture to the eyes and brains of a wide cable audience, first on CNBC, then later on MSNBC, where the program Matthews hosted was a mainstay of weekday programming. Matthews’ breathless, take-no-prisoners style was a fixture of the program, whose early iterations revealed his healthy bipartisan delight in skewering windbags and those with pre-packaged agendas.

Matthews’ show was suddenly, unceremoniously canceled on Monday, March 2, on the eve of what was expected to be his characteristically cranky, panoramic analysis of the Super Tuesday Democratic primaries. It was the swiftest fall from grace in recent television history, and its very suddenness was what made it so immediately, palpably surreal.

EVERYTHING on MSNBC programming seemed fine on Monday at 4 pm West Coast time (7 pm ET). Ari Melber had just signed off from his program, The Beat With Ari Melber, handing off to Matthews, as he’d done hundreds of times before. Matthews came on the screen ... and a minute and 50 seconds later, a career was over:



The whole thing thoroughly unsettled Steve Kornacki, MSNBC’s resident numbers guru, who was hastily thrown in to follow Matthews’ disappearing act right after it happened, with no warning at all:



The Matthews vanishing was the merciless nature of the digital age made instantly plain. Despite the speed of events, though, there were many signs that we should have seen all of this coming. Coming from a long way off. A story by veteran journalist Lloyd Grove and other reporters, in The Daily Beast on Monday, reveals how the Hardball host has been pushing the behavioral envelope for years.

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FROM THE Beast: “According to sources at MSNBC, Kathleen [Matthews, former Washington local news anchor and Chris Matthews’ wife] had communicated concerns over the past several months to network chief Phil Griffin, Chris’s long-ago Hardball executive producer when the show aired on CNBC. She expressed worry that her husband’s on-air controversies would become more frequent, more embarrassing, and more damaging to his legacy.

“For months, it was known to some inside the network that Kathleen had pushed for her husband, now 74, to have a more limited schedule. Instead, the MSNBC anchor found himself on TV during more major events than he had since the 2016 election cycle.

“And while acting as a fixture of MSNBC’s Democratic primary coverage, Matthews continually came under fire for on-air comments including likening Sen. Bernie Sanders’ Nevada caucus victory to Nazi Germany overtaking France during World War II, a comment for which Matthews later apologized; and asking Sen. Elizabeth Warren why she would believe a woman over Michael Bloomberg regarding accusations that the ex-mayor told a pregnant employee to “kill” her unborn child.”

Making matters worse, the Friday before he quit, Matthews managed to mix up the identities of Jaime Harrison, a South Carolina Democrat pursuing Lindsey Graham's seat in the Senate, and Sen. Tim Scott. Both Harrison and Scott are black men.

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But there’s been history more ancient than that, and more problematic. Matthews has been previously taken to task for making inappropriate comments about women. The Daily Beast reported that exposés of Matthews'  bad behavior, reported on The Daily Show and in GQ, finally forced the hand of MSNBC brass, which almost certainly gave Matthews a Hobson’s choice scenario: Jump or be pushed. Resign or be fired.

“After my conversation with MSNBC, I decided tonight will be my last Hardball,” Matthews said Monday. “So let me tell you why. The younger generations are ready to take the reins. We see them in politics, the media, and fighting for their causes. They’re improving the workplace.” Matthews then apologized for his history of making “compliments on a woman’s appearance some men, including me, might have once incorrectly thought were OK.”

Matthews' legacy precedes him. He volunteered for the Peace Corps at the age of 23, serving as a trade adviser in Swaziland. He later worked for House Speaker William P. (Tip) O’Neill, wrote speeches for President Jimmy Carter, and went on to be Washington bureau chief for the San Francisco Examiner. In 1988 he published the book “Hardball: How Politics is Played, Told by One Who Knows the Game,” his collected observations of the workings of Washington. He brought the title, and the free-wheeling perspective, to TV in 1997.

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BUT ANOTHER legacy precedes him too. Matthews has, over the years of Hardball, revealed a hardly-submerged reverence for the era of John F. Kennedy ascendant, its mores and mystique. His Peace Corps service can fairly be laid to his embrace of JFK’s ask-not social agenda.

In the repartee with numerous guests in years of TV interviews, he revealed (perhaps by accident) his own emotional subscription to the clubby, towel-snapping, boys-will-be-boys ethos of white males of the Camelot era and after, the denizens of the world of Mad Men, wannabe masters of the universe. But that indelible part of Matthews’ past wouldn’t stay in the past; that’s what led to the events of March 2.

Setting aside the controversies that lit a fire under his career implosion, Matthews has been a challenge to watch on television for a long, long time. On the air, his relative discomfort with the discourse of television comes through. Example: For some time now, before cutting to a news video, Matthews has moved from looking directly and naturally at the camera to squinting hard at ... something in front of him — in the same shot.

And when he got people in on-set interviews, watching a guest answer a Chris Matthews question was something you did while holding your breath. You wanted to see how far the poor bastard got into answering before Matthews barged in with another question -- or a statement. What was the over/under? Would the guest make it five seconds in? Ten seconds?

It was, of course, the sign of his restless, irrepressible curiosity. But keeping interview subjects on tenterhooks was something Matthews always held up as a point of pride in and of itself. It was his red badge of toughness, his way of saying that on Hardball, the usual rhetorical courtesies didn’t apply, even when they desperately needed to, and no one gets away with anything.

Unless you’re Chris Matthews.

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WELL, THAT getting away with things is over. MSNBC leadership is deciding what to do with the hour-long hole in the schedule that Matthews’ exit has created. Joy Reid, former editor at TheGrio, author and a rising network star (host of AM Joy), has been mentioned as a possible replacement. Kornacki has been tapped to fill it in the short term.

But that hole in the schedule is nothing compared to the coming gaps in the coverage of as important a presidential campaign as we’ve ever witnessed, the gaps of Matthews’ missing perspective. It felt strange, oddly incomplete, watching the Super Tuesday returns without Matthews on air, firing impossible questions at unsuspecting guests, or adding the historical overview that we can’t get enough of — because we don’t get enough of it.

Until he lands another gig, and he almost certainly will, we’ll miss that ruthless ability to cut to the chase, to reveal a politician’s spin for the bullshit that it often was, and often is. And yeah, we’ll look ruefully at the way he wore his liberal heart on his sleeve, and the way his leg tingled, and that mad bray of a laugh.

And we’ll lament his absence from the political conversation when we need it most, the absence of a man who was in other ways, willful and accidental, turning himself into a dinosaur before our very eyes.

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Image credits: Matthews: MSNBC. The Daily Beast logo: The Daily Beast Company LLC.