Matthews: I Get Emotional, Obama 'Gets To Me'

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It wasn't quite a "thrill up up my leg" moment, but Chris Matthews clearly hasn't gotten over his love affair with the candidacy of Barack Obama. It was a discussion of NM Gov. Bill Richardson's endorsement of Obama on today's Morning Joe that inspired an outpouring of emotion in which among other things Matthews acknowledged Obama "gets to me."

CHRIS MATTHEWS: I think [Richardson's] a gutsy guy, his own man, and I think it's a powerful endorsement. It certainly would have been powerful if it had gone the other way to Senator Clinton. I think it'll be a prized endorsement for Senator Obama, especially coming from a, he also comes from an interesting background. He always says, he says, you know, I've got a, what does he say? I've got an English name, I've got a Mexican mother, and I look like an Indian. I mean, he's, he's always had an interesting --

MIKA BRZEZINSKI: That's fabulous.

MATTHEWS: -- way of describing his own background. And then you have Barack Obama with his interesting background. I think it's an interesting sort of "many faces of Benneton" moment for the country. It's always good when this happens, obviously.

BRZEZINSKI: That's a great way of putting it.

MATTHEWS: Well, I'm very positive about the whole thing, and I loved the speech by Barack Obama. I get emotional when I watch these, I mean, he gets to me. I think his statement as an American is extraordinary, it's powerful, and it's so necessary. And I do think it's a Rohrshach test for Americans. It's not a race test. It's a test about sensibility. And some of us are amazingly taken by that kind of message and others are not. It's just, it's in our DNA I suppose. Some people are cold to it. They don't like it. People like Charles Krauthammer today, people like Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity--people I get along with. But they just have a different sensibility, they have a different reaction to Barack Obama then I do. They just do.

Among the questions Krauthammer poses to Obama in that column of today to which Matthews alluded is this one:

Why did you give $22,500 just two years ago to a church run by a man of the past who infects the younger generation with precisely the racial attitudes and animus you say you have come unto us to transcend?

Why indeed? Guess that puts me in that cold Krauthammer camp.