Newsbusters catalogs an admission by Chris “Saul Alinsky fan” Matthews knows about higher educational bias:
A frustrated Chris Matthews, on Tuesday’s Hardball, chided the left for being disappointed in Barack Obama as he essentially told them, he’s the best they’ve got and are going to get. During a segment in which the Salon’s Joan Walsh and Talking Points Memo’s Josh Marshall wondered why Obama and Joe Biden were admonishing their base to stop whining, Matthews took up for Team Obama as he tried to calm down the lefties: “This president has done what we were all taught in graduate school to do, what progressives have believed in from years and years, decades ago…You compensate for the loss of consumer spending and business investment with government spending…No one has had a better idea since the 1930s. Number two, The Wall Street crowd needed governing. They didn’t have any, now they’ve got some. Number three, he’s pushed for progressive taxation, he’s going after the rich. He’s not giving them their tax cut.” [audio available here]
MATTHEWS: Let me tell you, here’s my view, in response to what you both said and I think it’s smart, both of you have said, I respect those views from everybody, anybody who’s passionate about politics I believe in. But I know this, this president has done what we were all taught in graduate school to do, what progressives have believed in from years and years, decades ago. One, you deal with an economic downfall with Keynesian economics. You compensate for the loss of consumer spending and business investment with government spending. That’s what you do. That’s what you’re supposed to. No one has had a better idea since the 1930s. Number two, The Wall Street crowd needed governing. They didn’t have any, now they’ve got some. Number three, he’s pushed for progressive taxation, he’s going after the rich. He’s not giving them their tax cut. I think on all three – he’s put people like Eric Holder in at Justice. He’s done a lot of things on the environment, he’s tried to do. He has done what a progressive should have tried to do. And we can argue about tone and degree of successful politics and personality, but I don’t know how a liberal or progressive can turn their back on this guy and say they’ve got something better waiting in the closet, ’cause I don’t know who that person is!
WALSH: I couldn’t agree with you more, Chris.
MATTHEWS: And nobody talking does. Anyway, there ain’t nobody out there but this guy, and certainly nobody no more progressive who can win election for sheriff. Anyway, thank you, Josh Marshall — maybe I’m getting mad — Josh Marshall and Joan Walsh.