Vote Obama: it's a matter of life or death! That's essentially how Chris Matthews characterized the choice confronting voters this November. Matthews not only put voting for Obama in the category of something to be done to "save your life," he analogized voting for McCain to a decision to remain on the Titanic rather than man the lifeboats.
The Hardball host was a guest on today's Morning Joe.
View video here.
CHRIS MATTHEWS: I keep thinking about the problems we're in. You know, I'm a movie nut, and I'm thinking, when you really have to make a dramatic change to save your life, are you willing to make that decision? If you're riding a motorcycle, you gotta turn it around and put it on a horizontal and put it in a skid, or you're gonna die. You know that kind of stuff. You got to take it down. Sometimes in life you gotta take it down. You gotta do something really tough. In the Titanic, when it was sinking, nobody wanted to get in the boats. The reason those first boats went off half-empty or three-quarters empty is, who wanted to get in some lifeboat in the middle of the North Atlantic when it's freezing? Better to stay on the ship. But the ship was sinking!
When we vote in November, the voter's gonna have to choose: do I stay on that ship which is big and warm and the lights are still on, or do I get in that little boat called Barack? Now these are tricky questions. The boat might not sink. McCain might make it. But you gotta make these tricky decisions under duress.
In addition to the "McCain might make it" fig leaf, Matthews went on to give himself a bit more cover, saying it was a bold move for Americans to vote for Reagan in 1980.
But the underlying message was unmistakable: we all know how things turned out for the Titanic, and Matthews explicitly paints Obama as the lifeboat. Vote for him "to save your life. If not, "you're gonna die."
Good thing Chris isn't overdramatizing the choice ;-)
