His Slate Runneth Over

Rick Hertzberg uses the now legendary Matthews-James video to riff on his history with and admiration for Chris Matthews. I'm kind of fond of the guy too, warts and all, so I enjoyed it:

When we met, Chris was doing press relations for a backwater office in the Carter White House called the President’s Reorganization Project, a moribund effort to abolish hundreds of federal agencies and put them all under half a dozen super-duper superdepartments, or something like that. Only the Reorganization Project didn’t have any press relations, because the press had long since lost interest in it, as had Carter, apparently. Chris was restless. He’d come into my office—I was a speechwriter—and talk about the events of the day. He was so full of ideas and energy that I begged and wheedled the White House higher-ups to let me make him a speechwriter, too, even though I had no idea whether he could write or not. I figured it didn’t matter. We could always take notes on his stream of consciousness and massage the result.