‘Hardball’ host ponders Obama’s first 100 days

Stimulus packages, tax cuts and hikes, pulling out of Iraq and closing the Guantanamo Bay detention center — MSNBC commentator Chris Matthews told a Charlottesville audience Monday that President Barack Obama has taken a page from Ronald Reagan’s playbook for his first 100 days in office.

“Reagan came in and pushed through tax cuts and increased military spending and broke the [air traffic controllers] strike. He proved that, in this ADD world we live in, if you’re going to do something, do it. Just do it and get it done,” Matthews said. “Get it done in the odd-numbered years because no one is running for election. You get it done and accomplish something now, and you can spend the next year defending it.”

Matthews spoke at the Miller Center of Public Affairs. He has served as White House aide and speechwriter to President Jimmy Carter and as a top aide to former Speaker of the House Thomas P. O’Neill Jr. He served as Washington bureau chief for 13 years for the San Francisco Examiner, and he currently hosts “Hardball with Chris Matthews” and “The Chris Matthews Show” on MSNBC.

The drive to get things done may be as close to Reagan as Obama may come, said Matthews, who compared Obama to former Presidents Lyndon B. Johnson, John F. Kennedy, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln. He noted that Johnson, Roosevelt and Lincoln were elected in times of national crisis.

“When the American people see something that’s wrong, they make a decision to put someone in office who probably would not otherwise be elected, like a former actor like Reagan or a Roosevelt, who was seen as a second-rate mind and a dilettante with a famous name,” Matthews said.

“In this election, the public wanted change and they wanted big change. The American public, I believe, is normally right of center and, in times of crisis, it shifts left of center. When the crisis eases, it tends to shift back to the right,” he said. “Barack is not a socialist, but he is definitely a liberal. I think he’s a studious president, more so than our recent president — dare I say that? — in that he’s trying to figure all of these things out and do something about them. We may not like what he’s doing, but he’s trying.”

Matthews said Obama has made some very smart moves. He unified the often-fractious Democratic Party by bringing Hillary Clinton into a position of importance, uniting working class white Americans who supported her with Obama’s more “professorial” supporters.

“There is no bipartisanship as of now, but there is partisanship; it’s a Democratic coalition in a party that could easily have been fractured,” he said. “There were a lot of bad feelings coming out of that [primary election] and he was able to pull it together.”

Whether the fiscal and financial moves the president has made will be as successful, only time will tell, Matthews said.

“If consumers stop spending and business stops investing, the common wisdom says it’s up to government to make up the difference. We’ve had a tremendous pace for growth [of national debt] in one term and that could be cause for concern in the future,” he said. “If the economy recovers, he’ll get all the credit. If it doesn’t, he’ll get the blame.”