I think Hilzoy makes an excellent point here. Forget whether Obama surrogate Kirk Watson froze up when Chris Matthews asked him to list Barack Obama's accomplishments. It's actually pretty weird that Matthews, who's supposedly the viewer's expert guide through the thickets of contemporary American politics, is pretending to ask Kirk Watson about Barack Obama's achievements. The record of the leading candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination is the sort of thing you'd expect a professional political pundit to have a fairly good handle on -- better, in fact, than an obscure Texas state senator. Now, maybe you think Obama has a solid history of legislative achievement (Hilzoy does) or maybe you don't (slightly closer to my view, though the same goes for Hillary Clinton and John Edwards), but it's certainly the sort of thing that political professionals with large research staffs can look into and form an opinion on. Having Watson stammer and gulp his way through the segment might have made for good television, but insofar as Matthews' job is to inform his audience rather than create striking YouTube clips, he should have actually taken charge of the segment. That's sort of the problem with these shows: They don't know whether they're supposed to inform their audiences or create compelling television, and sometimes letting the latter happen means accepting that the former won't. Meanwhile, Watson has written a charming and self-deprecating post on the whole affair.
