I need to restrain my enthusiasm about Chris Matthews. He’s my go-to guy for politics, he’s both brilliant and streetsmart (though his self-indulgent streak–lately he’s been airing clips of his dancing on Ellen DeGeneres’s show, two nights in a row–is simply mindboggling). Tonight Matthews was at his best. He had on Deborah Solomon of the New York Times, who had lately interviewed the Rev. John Hagee, and David Kuo of beliefnet.
Both reporters were making the argument that the political culture is going too far in its scrutiny of the candidates’ pastors and other religious connections. We’ve gone "into the weeds," Kuo said, while Solomon was saying that Hagee’s and Jeremiah Wright’s views don’t really matter re McCain and Obama.
Matthews cut this off. He pointed out that we’ve just had a president whose religious beliefs affected his decisionmaking re the Middle East. Then he said, "I want to know everything." It was a great journalistic comment, aimed in this case at journalists. Let’s have as many facts as we can, then decide what’s important. Let’s be curious, not incurious.
Some day this guy’s going to talk about Jews and Israel in American politics…
