Christian eschatology sees Jesus Christ as the central, salvific figure of all of human history. So it's perhaps blasphemously fitting that MSNBC's Chris Matthews sees his messiah as the object of all of American history.
"President Obama is the product of our turbulent history, all that came before led to him," Matthews insisted in the closing portion of his "Barack Obama: Making History" documentary that aired at 10 p.m. Eastern on Monday. As such, Obama "needs to continue making history," for "the moment he becomes just another incumbent president, bogged down in the status quo, he will lose something vital since we first met him: his historic self."
We all knew that the Matthews-narrated documentary tonight was going to be a complete puff piece, but Matthews has really topped himself.
Just as President Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize before doing anything to merit it, MSNBC's Obama cheerleader-in-chief Chris Matthews insists that history's judgment of the 44th president of the United States must be inverted from its usual order.
Presidents slog through the controversies of their day and in retrospect achieve their place in history. Here Matthews insists that Obama is a great historical figure who is in danger of being brought down from the presidential pantheon by narrow-minded partisans and petty, passing controversies.
Mr. Obama could not have asked for a more sycophantic "documentary" than what Matthews offered up tonight.
