Media Matters for America: Thu, Jun 12, 2008
Matthews says Obama's running mate should be "someone who's palpably patriotic," calls women voters "low-hanging fruit"
A week after saying that "it's a hard thing for someone like Barack Obama" to express a "gut sense of Americanism," MSNBC host Chris Matthews said that Obama should pick as his running mate "someone who's palpably patriotic, who sort of exudes it." Matthews was commenting on NBC political director Chuck Todd's assertion that "if you figure out a way to pick a running mate, for instance, that passes that character test, it's -- say it's a Joe Biden or somebody in a military uniform that has a whole bunch of ribbons, that gives you that security, that gives these men saying, you know what, I'm not sure about Obama, but, you know what? He's got somebody there."
The exchange took place on the June 11 edition of MSNBC's Hardball, during which Matthews hosted Todd to discuss an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll released that day. Referring to Sen. John McCain's 6-percentage-point advantage among suburban white women in the poll (Obama leads among women overall, 52-33), Matthews asserted, "Women are low-hanging fruit, though, in the terms of politics. You can reach up and say, 'I'm pro-choice, he's not.'" He then added, "But you're playing for a close election. If you want to reach up for the higher, for the harder ones to reach, you can win big." Matthews' comment about women voters recalled generalizations Matthews has made about other constituencies. On the April 16 edition of Hardball, Matthews said, "If you're a Jewish voter probably you care about Israel, that's a safe bet. You have one key concern." He continued, "I can't think of other groups that would make it that simple. But clearly, if you're African-American, you care about civil rights. You care about certain programs of the federal government. That's a generalization, but probably true. You're more progressive."
Of the NBC/Journal poll's finding that McCain leads Obama among white men, Matthews asked Todd, "Is their concern with Obama that he's more an elitist or that he's African-American? Is there any way to distinguish that?" Todd responded, "You can't distinguish between it."
Todd then repeated a claim that Matthews made the previous week and that Obama directly rebuts in his autobiography -- that Obama has never been in the middle class. Todd asserted, "The values question, I think, takes it -- that, you know, goes to what you, I think, have put very eloquently, when you say, you know, Obama does well with rich and poor because he's been both, but he's never been anything in between and he's not connecting on that in-between with these folks." On June 3, Matthews said of Obama: "He's gone from being a poor kid, growing up in Hawaii, in Indonesia, part of his youth, mixed family background, had to struggle, worked with community organizations; went to these incredibly elite schools, Columbia and Harvard Law, making Law Review and all that. He missed the middle part." However, as Media Matters for America noted following Matthews' June 3 remarks, Obama makes clear in Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (Crown, 1995) that he has life experience in the middle class....
http://mediamatters.org/items/200806120003?f=h_latest
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