The Blaze Implies Chris Matthews Took A Shot At Ronald Reagan’s Alzheimer’s Disease

On Monday night’s Hardball, host Chris Matthews briefly worked over a recent Gallup poll that named Americans’ picks for the Greatest President Evah, criticizing the predominance of recent POTUSes (POTI™?) in the top results. The Blaze‘s Pam Key (aka “Naked Emperor News”) seems to think Matthews was taking a shot at Ronald Reagan‘s Alzheimer’s Disease, posting the video with the headline “Chris Matthews Disgustingly Concludes Americans ‘Limited Memory’ Must be Only Reason They Think Reagan Was a Great President.”

Key doesn’t provide any comment beyond that headline, so it is unclear whether she believes Matthews’ comment was a deliberate shot at Reagan, or simply an insensitive, inadvertent reference. In either case, though, the implication itself is not only disgustingly unfair, but illogical as well.

Here is the clip to which Key refers, in which Matthews introduces the poll as “more of a memory quiz” as he ticks off the top seven results, beginning with Barack Obama.

His premise is clearly not restricted to Ronald Reagan’s presence atop the poll, but encompasses the disproportionate representation of recent presidents in the top results. Additionally, Alzheimer’s Disease is not associated with the type of memory dysfunction that Matthews describes, in fact striking first at “recently learned information.”

Matthews doesn’t appear to be referencing a medical condition at all, but rather, a foible of human nature. In a way, he takes it easy on Reagan, failing to mention the possibility that his position atop the poll could be partially chalked up to a Grover Norquist-led effort to name, or rename, everything in America after Reagan.

Matthews isn’t just pulling this out of thin air, either. Gallup’s press release on the poll notes:

Americans as a group have a propensity to mention recent presidents, not surprising given that the average American constantly hears about and from presidents in office during their lifetime, and comparatively little about historical presidents long dead. Four of the five most recent presidents are in the top 10 greatest presidents list this year — Obama, George W. Bush, Clinton, and Reagan.

To gain a little bit of perspective, a 2010 survey of 238 historians resulted in exactly zero of the four most recent presidents in the top 10. In that survey, Bill Clinton ranked #13 behind #11 JFK, and Barack Obama came in at #15, three spots higher than Reagan’s #18. The historians’ choice for best president ever has been the same since the survey began, in 1982: Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the Gallup sample’s #6 choice.

In the end, who are you going to trust? A bunch of elitist, high-fallutin’ historical eggheads and their fancy book-larnin’, or a sample of 1,015 of the same American people who lent dramatic tension to the question “Are you smarter than a fifth-grader?”

I’m not convinced that either group really nailed it. Sure, FDR is a solid choice for numero uno, but is it really fair to rank Barack Obama at fifteenth when he had barely been in office for a year? Couldn’t they have given him some kind of Rookie of the Year award? The same survey ranked George W. Bush at 23rd in 2002, one year into his term, and dropped him to #39 in last year’s survey. A reasonable person could fairly conclude that the Obama and Bush results each fall into the “too soon” category.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.