Jon Stewart had Chris Matthews on the other day to talk about his new book, “Life’s a Campaign”, and it got a little heated.
The Daily Show billed the clip (click to watch it)as “Jon Stewart gives Chris Matthews the worst interview of his lifeâ€. Andrew Sullivan referred to it as a savaging. It was #4 on Reddit. It got callouts from Tapped and others. Ha, watch Chris Matthews finally get taken down!
Only, it seems all of them missed the point. Stewart’s main criticism is that life is not a campaign. Campaigns are about lying and artifice, life is not. Matthews book is about using campaign techniques to achieve your goals. Whether your goals are good or bad is your own problem, he’s just showing you some tools to help. Objectives and tactics are completely different things.
Countless authors have written books in the same style. Stewart mentioned The Prince. I thought of How to Win Friends & Influence People. Or any of the hundreds of books on negotiation, The 7 Successful habits etc. etc. etc. ad nauseum. At worst, these books are amoral (not immoral), they will not make your life sad and depressed, as Jon said.
That was exactly what annoyed me. Tucker Carlson deserves it, and for exactly the things Stewart nailed him for. Chris Matthews deserves it too, but not for the idiotic critique Stewart through at him. If you want to make a substansive attack, make it. Otherwise you just make yourself look dumb.
The point of this interview, I thought, was to give Chris Matthews his comeuppance, nothing else. I don’t think Jon honestly cared at all about the book. Seems very similar to what he did with Tucker Carlson a few years ago on Hardball. It just seemed like a slightly toned down version of “Yikes, the funny man has a serious side” that we’ve seen come out from time to time. That being said, I loved it 🙂