LOS ANGELES -- At a Television Critics Association press conference Tuesday, three high-profile MSNBC hosts were asked to predict who would win the next presidential election, and to identify the TV commentators who most inspired them before they themselves became TV commentators. Rachel Maddow, Chris Matthews and Lawrence O'Donnell, as usual, had no shortage of opinions.
According to this very focused polling, two out of three MSNBC hosts think Barack Obama will be re-elected...
Regarding the 2012 presidential race, both Maddow and O'Donnell think Obama will remain in the White House after next year. O'Donnell predicted Obama instantly and without equivocation; Maddow, while warning, "I make horrible predictions," also predicted a victory for the incumbent -- though, she explained, "that has mostly to do with the strength of the Republican field right now."
Matthews, though, drew laughs by being honestly noncommittal.
"I don't know," he sighed, shrugging verbally as well as physically. "You know, you look at the economy, you find the answer.
"I'm pretty conventional about that. If the unemployment rate's down below 8 [percent,] he'll be re-elected. If it's high above 8, it'll be very tough."
The question about their respective early TV commentator idols and influences also drew a split decision.
"I've been nuts about politics since I was 5 years old," Matthews swore, and said the 1968 campaign was the one that got him in terms of watching TV in graduate school.
"I never was as excited about politics," he said, "as covering the ['68] New Hampshire primary with Gene McCarthy, watching it on the student union building with [Walter] Cronkite and [Eric] Sevareid. And to watch Sevareid and Cronkite talk about a Gene McCarthy primary challenge to Lyndon Johnson is just about the toughest show I've ever seen. It was bracing. It was exciting. The stakes were everything. The war was unbelievably important on campus.
"I think Sevareid was the best," Matthews went on. "I've always looked up to him." Matthews added, though, that he thought CBS Chairman William S. Paley often handcuffed Sevareid by insisting that his opinions include acknowledgment of other points of view as well.
"He always had to say, 'On the other hand,'" Matthews recalled. "A bartender friend of mine used to call him Eric Severalsides," Matthews added, drawing big laughs, but mostly from us older critics.
"It was a tough business back then, doing commentary," Matthews said, going all the way back to Edward R.Murrow's CBS radio "boys" of the 1940s, and including the next few decades. "[William] Shirer, [Charles] Collingwood, Murrow -- they were all fired by the network. They all had nice funerals, but they were all fired...
"I think we're in a much freer period now."
O'Donnell explained he "grew up with no interest in, and no heroes in," politics or political coverage, until the Writers' Guild strike of 1988 found him "stumbling into New York Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan's re-election campaign." Moynihan was a former college professor of O'Donnell's, and O'Donnell "got bitten by it right away."
Yet though his attention to the political arena began, O'Donnell added, "well into my adulthood," he did soon identify an ideal -- "our friend Tim Russert," who began in politics just as O'Donnell had. "He walked into Sen. Moynihan's first campaign office, in Buffalo, NY, in 1976, and walked in there as a volunteer." Rising to the senator's chief of staff, Russert had, O'Donnell said, a "daily tutorial" that served and informed him well once he began working as a political analyst and TV host for NBC.
"There was just no doubt in my mind," O'Donnell said, "that when I was watching Tim Russert, I was watching this done in the best possible way it can be done."
Finally, when it came to Rachel Maddow's turn, the MSNBC host who just signed a new multi-year contract identified... no one.
"I didn't grow up with much of an interest in electoral politics or in journalism," she admitted. "I grew up with an interest more in policy.
"As a gay kid growing up in the '80s in the San Francisco Bay area, I was very, very, very much affected by both the AIDS crisis and the AIDS activist movement as my sort of formative growing-up years. So for me, politics and politicians were a means by which really important policy decisions got made, that either saved people's lives or killed them -- including people who I knew and loved.
"And so, I studied public policy in college specifically to become a better activist. And I studied philosophy in college in order to be able to make better arguments about public policy in order to get things changed...
"I ended up in media as a complete departure from everything I'd done. I took my first media job as an odd job, as a sidekick on a local radio station's 'Morning Zoo.' I also did landscaping, but it turned out I was better reading the news than doing landscaping."
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MSNBC's Hardball with Chris Matthews airs weekdays at 5 and 7 p.m. ET; The Last Word, with Lawrence O'Donnell, airs weekdays at 8 and 11 p.m. ET; and The Rachel Maddow Show airs weekdays at 9 p.m. and midnight ET.