On primary night, the choice is Matthews
Amid noise, anchor is surprisingly calm
Who would have ever thought we'd turn to Chris Matthews for relief? That's like turning to Paris Hilton for literary criticism.
And yet that's precisely what's happening as we descend further into the cable television madhouse on primary nights. Tonight, once again, the Motor Mouth from Philly will be an island of relative calm compared to the astronaut's stress test of a thing over on CNN.
The networks abandoned serious political coverage with their tails between their legs ages ago. CNN is simply one long overload. Too many people, too much noise, too many graphics. It is a blur that drives you to the dulcet tones of Matthews over on MSNBC, perhaps with a quick stop at brahma bull-riding on one of those animal channels along the way.
The mere thought of Matthews as a tonic is shocking because he is an icon of the loud - perhaps the icon of the loud on television above Bill O'Reilly on Fox. Matthews is famously cheerful, rude, irritating. He's also an effective host of "Hardball," his MSNBC political show, and a happy warrior whose enthusiasm for the game is infectious. It's just that his noise joystick got stuck at Yell.
Matthews has also been roughed up recently for a perceived anti-Hillary slant, which led him to apologize on television. So, all in all, we're not talking about a man of measured thought here.
Yet the truth is you don't need a cast of thousands to do a good job. They are, in fact, a disaster for sane political analysis. Two people, the same number used to cover and analyze a football game, do just fine as the frantic contest to call a race first becomes increasingly irrelevant.
We begin with Wolf Blitzer, the unavoidable CNN frontman, who appears to be hopped up on speed that some malfeasant put into his bottled water. There's simply no other explanation for his performance, which includes dashes around the huge CNN set in the manner of Groucho Marx.
Blitzer is not the only contributer to this 78-rpm experience. There are the manic deliveries of Soledad O'Brien, who peppers in-house analyst Bill Schneider with questions about exit polls as the evening progresses. Her unfortunate squeaky voice, combined with a Gatling gun delivery, makes her sound like one of the Chipmunks.
The overall pace is brutal, as Blitzer steers us from one analyst to another - there are hordes of them. (Former Secretary of Education Bill Bennett always looks miffed that he's in the rear row of pundits and not with the varsity up front where he is convinced he belongs.)
Most of these on-air figures rush through their sentences like people who know they're about to get cut off any second, for good reason. The diamond in this rough is John King, CNN's chief national correspondent, whose cool parsing of voting patterns is superb.
Most irritating is the moniker Blitzer uses to describe his team - The Best Political Team on Television. I use capital letters here because the slogan has the ring of a trademarked name. That alone is enough to make you run screaming out of the room.
At some point, you either reach for a Valium or turn to MSNBC, where Matthews and Keith Olbermann hold the fort. It is there, of all places, that you begin to exhale.
These are two of the strangest bedfellows on TV, but they work rather well together. Matthews carries on - he can't not carry on. But he's only one voice, and he's balanced by Olbermann, a welcome cup of chamomile tea.
Olbermann is really not a political animal. Bill O'Reilly, not politics, is his sweet spot. He does fine - he's smart - but misses the follow-up lunge for the jugular that is instinctive to Matthews.
I can't tell you the number of people I've talked to who have made the election-night exodus to Chris Matthews. It's nothing he's doing differently. It's just that CNN has gone berserk.
We'll be telling our grandchildren about the time we fled to Matthews for relief. They'll look at us with concern. We'll explain that we were mad as hell at CNN and weren't going to take it anymore.
Sam Allis can be reached at allis@globe.com. 