Hardbrawl

A History With Hillary

(Richard A. Lipski - The Washington Post)

Friends are quick to say that Matthews isn't afraid of strong women. They point to his wife, Kathleen, until recently a top anchor at WJLA-TV, and the hard-charging female producers around him.

Still, some high-profile women are now holding him up as a symbol of the insensitive male pundit.

He enjoys the towel-snapping banter of the locker room, praising women's looks on camera and off. For that matter, he also jokes about people's ethnicity, saying that the Irish hold grudges and teasing pals about being Jewish.

Matthews has said on the air that he finds Teresa Heinz Kerry "very attractive." He told Gennifer Flowers she is a "knockout." He told Elizabeth Edwards, "I love your smile." He said Michelle Obama was "attractive" and "classy." He told radio host Laura Ingraham, "You're beautiful and you're smart." And he jokingly urged CNBC anchor Erin Burnett to move closer to the camera, calling her "beautiful" and a "knockout." (Matthews says he was in "a whimsical mood" that day.)

He routinely talks over his panelists, but some women feel especially trampled. Matthews challenged Dee Dee Myers, the former Clinton White House spokeswoman, when she argued last month that nobody expected Hillary Clinton to be the inevitable nominee. Everyone thought Clinton would win, he insisted.

"That's wrong, Chris," Myers said.

"Hey, that's a fact," Matthews said. He kept interrupting her, saying: "This is revisionism, Dee Dee."

"Chris," she said, "you ask me a question, if you would let me answer it, it would be helpful -- "

"You are answering it and you're wrong," Matthews declared. Myers was so annoyed she refused to return to the next night's show until Matthews called to apologize.

"Chris was very disrespectful to me," Myers says. "He has every right to disagree with me, but he did it in a way that was dismissive and wrong. Not only was it bad manners, it was bad television. . . . My only regret is I didn't make him apologize on the air."

Others say that Matthews's smartest-guy-in-the-studio intensity is simply his style. "Chris asks a question, he often answers his question, and then he asks you to comment on his answer to his question," says Fineman. "Which I'm perfectly happy to do."

Among the women with whom Matthews has tangled, Clinton may be the most curious case study. Kathleen Matthews, now a Marriott executive, has given Hillary Clinton's campaign the maximum allowable donation of $2,300, and one of their three children, Michael, has worked in Africa for Bill Clinton's global initiative.