Chris Matthews, who in talking about the feelings that he experienced during a speech given by then-candidate Barack Obama, used the descriptive phrase “thrill going up my leg.”
Interestingly, in an article Matthews penned for an upcoming issue of Time magazine, he seems to be doing a back flip.
When it comes to Matthews’s emotional disposition regarding Obama these days, the leg thrill may have turned into a twitch.
The Time article, titled “Five Things JFK Could Teach Obama,” is adapted from a new book by Matthews called “Jack Kennedy, Elusive Hero.”
In the book, the MSNBC host criticizes Obama using language that one might expect to hear on Fox News' "Hannity."
As Obama's re-election campaign tries to recapture the 2008 magic, Matthews offers an assessment that just may have the president's campaign staffers plugging up their ears. He notes that the wild enthusiasm of the old campaign has been replaced with a gloomy apathy.
“The American people who elected Barack Hussein Obama are on the verge of feeling discarded,” Matthews writes.
“Too many feel they were used for that purpose: to give him the job and then fade back into the obscurity from which they cheered him and saw him as their deliverance. It’s something he has to fix,” Matthews warns.
The cable TV personality calls the president a “transactional” politician, and he suggests that Obama is one who “cuts deals with people, but he doesn’t forge bonds." Matthews also wonders when Obama is "going to bolster his political forces."
Suggesting that the president is not a team player, Matthews writes that Obama is “lonely because he’s wanted to be alone. He doesn’t like the backslapping. He doesn’t like hanging around with other politicians. Guess what? They’ve noticed.”
Sounding a theme that critics of the administration’s economic policies have raised, Matthews declares, “Nobody is going to believe the second Obama term is going to be better than the first unless Obama lets it be known that he’s learned from his mistakes.”
That Matthews has moved from elation to irritation may be an indicator of a more wide-ranging mood shift, that being the lack of thrills up the legs of the Democratic base.
James Hirsen, J.D., M.A. in media psychology, is a New York Times best-selling author, media analyst, and law professor. He is admitted to practice in the U.S. Supreme Court and has made several appearances there on landmark decisions. Hirsen is the co-founder and chief legal counsel for InternationalEsq.com. Visit Newsmax.TV Hollywood.
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