Chris Matthews, who was last seen critiquing the way Barack Obama ordered orange juice in a diner, is now
obsessed with the idea that Obama can’t connect with people in a diner:

A week after claiming that Sen. Barack Obama “can’t walk into a dinette [sic] with five or six guys there, white guys, in some cases. He can’t just shake hands and hang out,” Chris Matthews asserted, “[Obama] doesn’t seem to have the knack for walking into a dinette [sic] with regular people in it and just having fun, just connecting.”

How does Matthews know this? How many diners, exactly, has he been in with Obama? And more importantly, why do we care?

This is the same silly script the press used in its 2000 coverage of Al Gore, which often described him as a wonky elitist who couldn’t “connect” with regular people. While it’s certainly true that neither is a natural retail politician like Bill Clinton or Bill Richardson, the point is that the facts are fit to the narrative just as they were with Gore. Matthews is almost certainly extrapolating from a few clips he’s seen of campaign stops based on the “Democrats=elitists” frame that is embedded in his mind.