To Chris Mathews' Surprise, Jon Stewart Doesn't play (Hard)Ball

Yesterday, Chris Mathews was on Daily Show to promote his book: "Life Is A Campaign" and boy, he must have been fuming after the interview. Chris has been on Daily Show before and is very appreciative of the positions Jon Stewart has taken in recent years. That really does not mean that Jon will return the favor. Jon has shown his disdain for knee jerk debate shows in the past and Chris Mathews happens to host one on MSNBC. I am not sure Jon did it out of purpose but somehow Chris Mathews and his book got trashed.

I have read reviews about this book and I have heard it has some interesting stories about American politicians. Chris, these reviews said, makes the point that you have to treat everything in life like a campaign of a politician and you can learn from how politicians survive.

Jon started the interview by saying “The book claims that people can use what politicians do in political campaigns to help their lives. ... That strikes me as fundamentally wrong.” Chris Mathews was still settling down and didn't know what was unravelling. And frankly, I was disconcerted. I haven't seen Jon trash people on his show like this and he has had some people whom he just does not like.
Exasperated,seeing everything go completely wrong in 2 minutes, Chris Mathews shouted:" You're trashing my book" and in the most nonchalant way, Jon replied " I'm not trashing your book, I'm trashing your philosophy of life". Ouch!! That must have hurt.

Chris must have come to Daily Show reasonably certain that he will get a bump from the loyal audience that laps up every book that Jon covers on his show. But this was some anti-climax. I am not sure about the background of this whole situation, what transpired between Jon and Chris that it happened this way but you could see that the situation became very awkward. By the end, even Jon knew that he was not fair to the person. So in today's show, he tried to make some amends but I doubt if it will help Chris' book. It is dead at least for the Daily Show audience( which happens to be a 1.8 million strong very well read crowd)