The period after Americans sit down to watch cable news coverage of the election — but before any reportable results start rolling in — is a sort of calm before the storm. On MSNBC, Rachel Maddow, Brian Williams, and Chris Matthews and their panel of guests decided to fill the space by talking about the rituals that candidates and their staff sometimes use to avoid the early returns. There were anecdotes about the contentious 2004 race between John Kerry and the incumbent Geroge W. Bush that spoke to the unreliability of exit poll data. But Matthews in particular had an unexpected story.
“What you do is you go to dinner at this time,” he said. “Tip [O’Neill], used to do this, my first guy I worked with in ’72, Wayne Owens did this; Jack Kennedy did with Ben Bradlee, his buddy. They went out to see a porn movie.”
“What?!” Rachael Maddow exclaimed.
“Oh yeah, during the West Virginia — I mean, [they] didn’t want to be anywhere near news.”
Matthews then clarified that JFK and the future Washington Post titan “tried to go to a nice [theater], but that was closed, they couldn’t get in. So they went to the other one.” Such is the unpredictability of American politics.