MSNBC Hardball host Chris Matthews made perfectly clear he is over the moon with the newly "authentic" and "relatable" Hillary Clinton, beguiled by her jokes the other day at a South Carolina Democratic women's event about how she's been dying her hair for years and so won't go gray in the White House.
What's more, Matthews's roundtable guests on his May 28 program seemed to agree that Hillary was hitting her stride as a personable candidate comfortable in her own skin, all of them, that is, save for Republican political strategist Liz Mair, who offered that Hillary's gotten only slighter better on the campaign trail and hinted that perhaps she's feeling her oats because she has no credible contender giving her a run for her money in the primary race:
LIZ MAIR: I mean, candidly, I have a different interpretation on what we saw of Hillary recently--
CHRIS MATTHEWS: That's why you're here.
MAIR: Yeah, I don't think she-- Thank you. I don't think that this is somebody who comes off as being real or authentic. Like, OK, maybe it's a small improvement, but given how much she was sort of the liberal equivalent of Mitt Romney in terms of being so scripted and so like, you know, unmovable and static and very almost robotic, it's such a minor difference to me that I just think she's going to have a long way to go with a lot of people.
MATTHEWS: We disagree. I think she's been great.
[...]
MATTHEWS: Jeb's at 10 percent. Jeb's at 10 percent right now. Hillary's at 80!
MAIR: He's also, he's also in a primary field that is packed with other plausible contenders. She's in a primary field with Bernie Sanders. There's a reason that those numbers look different. But to your point about does she look any worse --
MATTHEWS: Before you put down Bernie Sanders, let me put him up against a couple of the guys. Ben Carson, is he going to be president of the United States?
MAIR: No.
MATTHEWS: Is Ted Cruz going to be president of the United States?
MAIR: I don't think so.
MATTHEWS: There are a bunch of them that don't really look like they're heading to the Oval Office.
MAIR: OK, but then let's go ahead and compare Bernie Sanders to Marco Rubio. Let's go ahead and compare him to Chris Christie. Let's go ahead and compare --
MATTHEWS: Well, how about Martin O'Malley?
PERRY BACON: Martin O'Malley is a more real candidate. I disagree with you Chris a little bit --
MAIR: You cannot say that the Democratic field is comparable.
Of course, there was no persuading Matthews, who has all but transferred his lovin' feelings for Barack Obama to being weak in the knees for Hillary. Here's his closing "Let Me Finish" commentary (emphases mine):
Let me finish tonight with Hillary out there on the campaign trail.
Campaigns are conversations. The candidate talks. People listen. If they like something they hear, they applaud it. If the press likes what it hears, thinks it’s significant, it writes it up, maybe even offers a cheer itself.
It also works the other way. If a candidate says something that fails to get a rise out of the crowd, or fails to impress the press, you can hear the thud, the dull but recognizable silence that fills the air when a politician says, to put it succinctly, nothing, when they serenade the traveling media with robo-talk, talking chirps, whatever you want to call the verbal excelsior that fills the air but not the brain.
Well, yesterday, Hillary Clinton spoke in the words, thoughts, feelings of a real-life human being.
She spoke openly of her personal ambition to once again live at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
Finally! A candidate is telling us that they want to be president! Isn’t it great to have one admit that simple desire to succeed in winning the top office in the country? To be counted among the 45 presidents! To have your portrait hanging there, not just in the White House, but in the history books of every young school child?!
Secretary Clinton went further yesterday, kidding the audience about the fact we won’t have to watch her hair turn white as president because, as she put it, she’s been coloring her hair for decades.
Look, most people want some kind of personal connection with the President of the United States. We don’t have that feeling about other offices – maybe mayor in a big city like New York – but we do have it about the person who seeks to fill Lincoln’s chair. We want a feel for the person we elect to our highest, most historic office.
Well, yesterday, Hillary Clinton showed she knows just how to give it to us.
And for that, I say, "Hooray for Her!"
