“Hardball With Chris Matthews” is celebrating its 7th anniversary, and to mark the occasion it’s lined up an all-star list of political celebrities, not to mention a nifty logo featuring a number 7 pool ball. John Kerry played the role of V.I.P. last night as he sat down with Matthews in Cleveland, Ohio.
Unfortunately, Matthews botched the event by twice mischaracterizing an exchange between the President and the White House press corps at his April 13 press conference.
About twenty minutes into the program Matthews told Kerry, “The president of the United States was asked by the press the other day if he’d ever made any mistakes as president. And he said he hadn’t.” Matthews then asked Kerry to respond.
At the prime-time press conference to which Matthews referred, Time magazine’s John Dickerson asked Bush, “After 9-11, what would your biggest mistake be, would you say, and what lessons you have learned from it?”
As we wrote at the time, Bush stalled his way through a non-answer to the first question, and ignored the second. But at no time did he deny ever making a mistake as president.
Matthews then dug himself in deeper. After painting a bizarre hypothetical that included George Bush and Vice President Cheney on the one hand and the Menendez brothers on the other, Matthews summed up: “But [Bush] says he never makes mistakes. So why would he be afraid to [testify] alone?”
Bush’s meandering non-answer to Dickerson’s original question has already been marked as a memorable piece of political theater. In the end, the president confessed that on the spur of the moment he couldn’t pin down just what might have been his worst mistake in office since 9/11. Indeed, his rambling response is one of the most frequently-replayed episodes of the president’s April 13 press conference, and has been the butt of more than one jibe from late-night comics.
But no one that we know of – until now – has characterized his comments as an assertion that his time in office has been mistake-free.
For that, we had to wait for Matthews – in a show honoring his longevity and success as a reporter.
–Thomas Lang
Thomas Lang was a writer at CJR Daily.