As a codicil to last night’s probably ill-advised explication de Milbank, may I suggest this post over at David Dayen’s D-Day blog. Dayen quotes a pretty eye-opening exchange between the New Yorker’s Ryan Lizza and Hardball host Chris Matthews. In it Matthews gives voice to the secret fear that Barack Obama and Jeremiah Wright are really the same person. (He even invokes Jekyll and Hyde.) Lizza argues—rather nobly, I’d suggest, but what do I know?—that journalists might have some responsibility to work against that way of thinking:

LIZZA: There should be a principle in these cases in this campaign. There is no guilt by association. This guy has one set of views, Obama has another set of views. If the views match up, then it’s fair game. But the guy’s been in politics since the mid-90s. He has a record in the State Senate in Illinois. He has a record in the US Senate. He’s laid out an agenda as a presidential candidate. Where do his views match up with Jeremiah Wright’s? And why as journalists are we confusing the two? It seems to me totally unfair that this guy is getting smeared with the views of someone just because he’s his former pastor.

But Matthews will have none of it:

MATTHEWS: So every time you have a problem with Barack, because you don’t really know him and he seems a little foreign to you, you think of him as both these guys. They’re different faces of the same guy. Jeremiah Wright to a lot of people is Barack Obama. They’ve become the same Chicago character running for President. One is the good doctor, the other is the monster that shows up at night.

LIZZA: Look, I think there’s a danger of that happening. But as journalists I think there’s a responsibility to make it clear…

MATTHEWS: OK, carve it apart, separate the two. Try.

LIZZA: This guy went to a church. This guy is the pastor of that church. Now one of those guys is running for President and has laid out a vision that is radically different than anything his left-wing pastor had to say. Yes, it tells you something about who he is, it tells you something about the community where he came from. But it doesn’t tell you anything, and nobody should confuse one with–

MATTHEWS: Do you think it might be hurting a good man like Mitt Romney and his family, and good members of the LDS Church, that they’re being embarrassed by this breakaway group down in Texas in the last couple weeks? You don’t think that story hurts Mitt Romney’s chances of being on the ticket? Yes it does. So I’m saying, these associations, fair or unfair, birds of a feather, it’s the way people think.

“It’s the way people think”—by “people” Matthews means–or he thinks he means, anyway–the little people, the people out there in TV land, and especially the working-class white people in his beloved Pennsylvania. But as the Klein and Milbank pieces I quoted yesterday show us, it’s really the “people” in the political-media echo chamber he’s describing.

Which leads me to offer an odd kind of praise for Matthews. However minor his value as a conduit of actual news, you’ve at least got to give him credit for this: he seems to be a pretty accurate mouthpiece for the id of the national media. All the irrational hopes, desires, and fears that most journalists are too professional to ever cop to openly come tumbling from Matthews’s mouth on a near nightly basis.