FAIRLY UNBALANCED
The only real winner in the endless Democratic primary? Those smart-ass policy wonks at MSNBC. Tom Carson straps himself to a barcalounger for days of infuriating coverage from the hottest political team on TV
By Tom Carson

If msnbc ever gives Hardball host Chris Matthews the heave-ho, the Smithsonian could always turn him into a traveling exhibition: The Boy Who Wanted the 2008 Election to Go On Forever. Behind soundproof glass, he'd still be gabbing blissfully about Hillary and Obama. No children under 6 admitted, obviously_they might recognize him as one of their own and opt for the same career.

We can make fun of Matthews all we like, but Charles Dickens would've loved him. During campaign seasons, his show might as well be called Hardball with Oliver Twist. No other TV face lights up like his does when the political world's response to "Please, sir, I want some more" is a resounding "Yes!" He's the Beltway equivalent of a sports nut, living for chances to blather about JFK or Nixon the way baseball fans go on about Roger Maris or Pete Rose.

What's funny is that Countdown's Keith Olbermann, Chris's MSNBC partner on vote-counting nights, is the one who started out as a sportscaster. But now that he's turned into Keith Olbermann, defender of the Constitution and scourge of presidents, he can barely hide his disgust at Matthews's adoration of the game for its own sake. You get one guess which of them your Critic has unexpectedly grown fonder of during 2008's run for the poses.

to politics junkies_pretty much all of us between now and November, right?_the out?t both men work for is where this year's action is. Once Obama versus the Clintons emerged as the election's killer story line, liberal-leaning but Hillary-dubious MSNBC copped the destination rep CNN enjoyed during the ?rst Gulf War and Fox relished when Bush was riding high. By now, Dubya's long good-bye has demoted Rupert Murdoch's infernal machine to the News Channel Time Forgot; aren't you astounded when you tune in and discover that Bill O'Reilly is still fulminating away? Its founding brainiac, Roger Ailes, must go around mumbling, "Live by the sword, die by the sword." Olbermann could use the same advice.

Here's an inconvenient truth, Keith: You should be rooting for John McCain. Across the spectrum, openly partisan news coverage does the most good and has the most pizzazz when it's at odds with power. Back when newborn Fox was chewing Bill Clinton's jugular for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, everyone except Bill's ball and chain could see that vast right-wing conspiracies have their upside. It's never bad to have a prominent media outlet hell-bent on not letting the Oval Office's occupant get away with much.

We spent most of Bush's presidency lacking any such thing. His inaugural converted Fox overnight into propaganda for America's rulers, following Karl Rove's playbook by politicizing September 11 to the GOP's bene?t and calling opposition to the Iraq war treason. But after Katrina, MSNBC shrewdly repositioned itself as the anti-Fox and Olbermann as the anti-O'Reilly. That's the blueprint the network has lately pushed too far by growing the vast left-wing conspiracy's answer to Sean Hannity in a mushroom vat somewhere: Dan Abrams, the maggot-eyed host of Countdown's current follow-up, Verdict.
Luckily, Abrams is excluded until the wee hours from the network's election-coverage roundtables, which feature the most entertaining batch of usual suspects on the tube_above all, Air America's Rachel Maddow contending with Pat Buchanan. Since Maddow is an out lesbian and Buchanan is Pitchfork Pat, you know they're each other's Antichrist, but the kick is that it turns both of them on. Their odd-couple chemistry is so kinky that you keep hoping they'll make America proud by saying to hell with decorum and going for the Fuck of the Century. If MSNBC just has the wit to give them their own morning hour once this election's dust settles, they could put Regis and Kelly in the shade no matter who's in the White House.

As of now, though_and just as O'Reilly and not Brit Hume became the face of Fox_it's Keith who personi?es the network, reducing Matthews to the status of court jester even when they're sharing the big desk. That's partly because Matthews is unmistakably life-size even at his most bombastic, but Olbermann has grasped the O'Reilly formula for adversarial cable news: It lets court jesters act like kings. Chris opposed Iraq from the start, but lefties went right on thinking of him as a D.C. yahoo. By contrast, when Olbermann started coming on as Bush's alternately chortling and sulfuric nemesis, liberals were thrilled. For brainy ?air and dieting skills, he sure beat Michael Moore, and what he was saying needed to be said, and then some. But Countdown's host is one Democratic victory away from turning as insufferable_and compromised_as his right-wing counterparts.

For my money, he's halfway there already. Righteous wrath and smugness are not an ideal combo, and Olbermann's delight in being Keith Olbermann has long since transformed anything genuine in his indignation into performance art. I prefer his politics to O'Reilly's, and unlike Bill he's genuinely droll. But when it comes to vanity getting its rocks off by posturing as moral outrage, I don't see much daylight between them. That one is a bully and the other a scold is just a stylistic distinction that suits their constituencies.

Anytime he's accused of pomposity, however, Olbermann can take refuge in irony, which isn't in O'Reilly's trick bag. When he's working his shtick at full blast, his eyes two Fabergé eggs of radiant self-love as his enraged schnoz spears the camera, you often can't tell whether you're watching a goofball pretend he's a preacher or the reverse. A right-wing version of The Colbert Report could make mincemeat out of this act, and by now I've got days when I wouldn't mind seeing one.
He's already too prone to liberalism's worst cultural tics: hoity-toity disdain and self-satis?ed cleverness. Unlike O'Reilly, who thrives on badgering opponents face-to-face_yelling is his calling_Keith prefers to bellow at his targets in absentia while surrounding himself (once a sportscaster, always a sportscaster) with chummy kindred spirits. I'm a fairly supercilious, privileged sort of dude myself, but watching Olbermann play do-si-do with his favorite foil, WashPostie Dana Milbank, can ?ll me with dull peasant rage. Though Milbank is bright and amusing, his night job as the enabler to Keith's plummy vanities doesn't do much for his integrity_or virility.

You can't say Olbermann's hubris aims low. He styles himself as the reincarnation of Edward R. Murrow, even swiping Murrow's "Good night and good luck" as his sign-off. Quite aside from whether he earns the comparison (he doesn't, but I don't get too worked up about it: I never had much patience for the -Murrow mystique to begin with), what's most revealing isn't the self-?attery involved but how anachronistic and even reactionary the aspiration is. Liberals who think of Murrow as a dragon slayer tend to forget he pretty much invented the patronizing gravitas that Roger Ailes had the genius decades later to convince Fox News viewers was the essence of TV's liberal bias.

So smart-ass Keith? He's only pretending to be po-mo. Not so deep down, what he really pines for are the days when condescending dorks with high opinions of themselves were media heroes.

matthews is a throwback, too, but in a more honest_hell, helpless_way.

Like many another media big-foot-in-mouth, he'd gotten less euphoric about Obama by midspring. We no longer got to hear Chris crow about "the thrill going up my leg," maybe because it had ?nally reached his shorts and failed to ?nd a home there. But his initial enthusiasm for Obama was the best proof that Hillary's candidacy was the more radical break with the past.

Obama's run will rightly look groundbreaking to historians. But from the start, it was easier to view through the nostalgic prism that pushes Matthews's buttons_as a rerun of the Kennedy era's promise. Never forget that Hardball's blowhard was a Peace Corps volunteer. His dislike of Hillary is likely grounded in the maddening fact that he can't think of anyone from 1962 to compare her to. She obviously ain't Jackie, and that pretty much uses up his list of broads he'd be happy saluting.

All the same, Matthews's thirst for fanhood is his most engaging quality. He's the only cable-news heavyweight who's de?ned by what he loves instead of what he hates. SNL, which should have bigger ?sh to fry_namely, Tim Russert, a far more egregious Beltway clown_never tires of spoo?ng his egomania, but that's misleading. Ego is purposeful. What Chris has is the spontaneous narcissism of a child. His bids for attention have no dignity, no real agenda, and no understanding that other modes of behavior exist. They're also too gleeful to even seem self-serving, which is paradoxical but attractive.
No matter how often his mouth gets him in trouble, he's still better at off-the-cuff zingers than Olbermann, who needs scripted diatribes to make his orotund -delivery effective. By contrast, Chris is most eloquent when his buzzing, unre?ective mind ?icks out something that's both perceptive and so tactless a second's forethought would have muted it. One classic I'm surprised didn't become notorious occurred when the Jeremiah Wright ruckus was at its height: Out of nowhere, Matthews blurted that Americans saw Obama and his pastor as Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Not unreasonably, his interlocutor tried to protest that Jekyll and Hyde were the same man_but that was the whole point, and you can't deny Chris knows white Americans. Nor could much top his wondrous rundown of the ?aws in Obama's persona the night of the Pennsylvania primary: "It is too debonair, it's too Fred Astaire, it's too 'Kumbaya.' "

His zest for politics for its own sake is what Olbermann is allergic to. Despite his affected ebullience, he can't understand just loving the roller coaster, even though Matthews is giving him an encyclopedia's worth of lessons in how political creatures digest reality. That's why the tension when they co-anchor MSNBC is snooty on Keith's side but plaintive on Chris's. Matthews is never more of a Dickens urchin than when Olbermann, the outsider but the bigger star, pulls rank and reproves him.

All the same, between Countdown's host and Hardball's, I know who I'm rooting for to end up as the tortoise to the other one's hare. While Keith is out to rescue a nation in peril, Chris just wants the game to go on and on. Yet Olbermann's act is likely to turn fatuous or worse once the nation is either no longer in peril or in peril at the hands of someone he applauds, and make no mistake: The guy who just wants the game to go on and on truly loves democracy. So what if he loves it because democracy's got big boobs_him included? Matthews passes the Dan Rather test: No matter how we mock him and how often he deserves it, we'll miss him when he's gone.

Tom Carson is a GQ correspondent.