Race-obsessed Hardball host Chris Matthews -- who back in 2010 after the State of the Union quipped that he "forgot [Barack Obama] was black... for an hour" --- seems to have used the occasion of his February 11 interview with David Axelrod to puff up the former Obama campaign strategist as a gallant white liberal riding to the rescue of black Democratic politicians. Axelrod was on the program to promote his new memoir, Believer: My Forty Years in Politics.
"What's made you devote a lot of your years as a political pro to helping black candidates, per se, black guys. I mean Harold Washington, people like that," Matthews inquired. For his part, Axelrod answered it was, wait for it, a black nanny:
Part of it is that I was raised by this woman who took care of me when my mother was at work, an African-American woman. She was the one who took me to see John F. Kennedy when I was five years old...
Naturally the follow-up to this was, you guessed it (emphasis mine):
CHRIS MATTHEWS: Do you think the president's gotten a raw deal because of his ethnicity? From some people.
DAVID AXELROD: You know, I always resisted this question, Chris, when I was working for him because I never wanted to give people a chance to say we were using race as an excuse, but there's no question that he's been treated differently by some people because of that.
No one else has been shouted down in the Congress during a speech -- "You lie!" -- No one else has been persistently--
MATTHEWS: Huckabee did it this week! Huckabee's still out there saying he's pro-Islamic and anti-Christian and Jewish!
AXELROD: And persistently challenging his citizenship.
MATTHEWS: Yeah.
AXELROD: These are reflections of race and I don't think there's any way to deny it.
Earlier in the segment, recalling President Obama's horrendously weak performance in his first televised debate with Mitt Romney, Matthews recalled for his guest his loathing of the former Massachusetts governor (emphasis mine):
I looked at Romney. He had all the traits I despise. He had aloofness, elitism. He seemed like I'm the white guy against the black guy. I'm the Mormon, well-educated prep school guy against the guy who's not. I've got all these advantages over, I don't know what mix it was in fairness to Romney. But there was a sense of superiority that really bugged me, and yet it worked for him!
One of the raps against Obama is his, well "aloofness." And has Matthews forgotten that Obama attended an excellent prep school himself (the Punahou School in Honolulu), as well as elite universities (Occidental College and Columbia for undergraduate and Harvard for his JD)?
