Heartbreaker: Matthews will stay on the air

posted at 9:28 am on January 8, 2009 by Ed Morrissey
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Speculation ran hot that Chris Matthews would abandon his television career to run against Arlen Specter in 2010 for the US Senate.  After all, if an angry clown like Al Franken can do it, why not a journalistic joke?  Unfortunately for television but fortunately for Pennsylvania, Matthews has decided to stay on the air:

Chris Matthews, the host of the MSNBC program “Hardball,” told his staff on Wednesday night that he would not run for the Senate in 2010 from Pennsylvania.

For much of the last year, Mr. Matthews had been considering entering the Senate race as a Democrat in his home state at the same time he was renegotiating his contract with NBC News. He had attended several meetings that had included Pennsylvania representatives as well as some major fund-raisers in the Democratic Party.

But Mr. Matthews, who was once a top aide to the House speaker, Tip O’Neill of Massachusetts, and ran for Congress as a Democrat in 1974, never formally declared himself a candidate, a decision which would have forced him out of his position at MSNBC.

How serious was Matthews about a run for political office?  According to the Times, only serious enough to keep his pay from being cut:

There has been speculation that Mr. Matthews, 63, was flirting with a Senate run as a way to give him some leverage in his contract talks. According to at least one earlier report, NBC was planning to ask Mr. Matthews to return but wanted him to take a drastic pay cut — from $5 million a year to an amount closer to $1 million.

I’d like to think that Matthews wouldn’t have had a chance in Pennsylvania, but Minnesotans have little room to heap scorn on egotistic celebrities who run for high political office with little qualification.  Hopefully, Pennsylvanians would have had more sense than we showed in this past election.  In any case, they won’t have to make that choice now, unless Terrell Owens returns and runs for Senator instead of Matthews.

What does this mean for MS-NBC?  They get to keep their Thrill Twins together for at least a few more years, obsequiously offering paeans to Barack Obama and attacking his critics.  Perhaps Keith Olbermann will make me his Worst Person in the World for pointing this out, but Matthews has a much more powerful platform at MS-NBC to conduct politics than he would in the US Senate.  No one at NBC apparently wants to exercise any editorial control over the “thrill up his leg” hackery, plus they’re still willing to pay him millions along with Olbermann to give a nightly re-enactment of Peter Finch’s scenery-chewing in Network.  Why would he trade that to be one of 100 voices on C-SPAN2?

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