"That's probably one of the reasons Chris's politics are a little difficult to categorize. But I don't know anybody - and I mean anybody - who has a better gut instinct about politics, American-style, than he does."

Matthews appears to stand astride national fault lines of politics, religion, ethnicity, party identification, and generational culture. It is a footing that gives him what Fineman calls a "seismological sensitivity" for the times and viewers many reasons for watching.

Surveying the scenery of his life - from his humble beginnings to his current success - Matthews says, "I am the happiest, luckiest guy on the planet. There is absolutely no basis for complaint."

His wife, Kathleen Matthews, is a local TV news anchor in Washington. The couple is successful socially and often entertains the capital's power elite, as well as the occasional Hollywood star, such as Barbra Streisand. They have three children - Michael, 17; Thomas, 13; and Caroline, 10.

It's all very far from Nicetown,

the working-class north Philadelphia neighborhood where Matthews's boyhood began in a crowded row house with four brothers who taught him to eat fast if he wanted seconds and to talk even faster, and louder, if he wanted to be heard.

"My father was a

court stenographer," Matthews says. "Thirty-year veteran. And he raised us very nicely. Those guys did better than the judges, you know. They worked all day and all night, taking the case, dictating it into the machine, and then coming home and typing it up, or having my mom do the typing. Dad typed on an old manual, and all you heard was a buzz. He was the greatest typist I've ever seen in my life. And he didn't believe in erasers. If he made one mistake at the bottom of the page, he'd rip it up and start all over again.

"Whenever I work late at night, I think of Dad working. This guy worked harder than I'll ever work in my life. He worked all the time. He was never done. When he retired, at 62, he said, `Get a job that you like.' That was his dream, because he didn't like his job."

Nevertheless, Matthews's parents managed to send all five of their sons to parochial schools, give them braces and piano lessons, and take them to the shore in the summer. He says, "They were the kind of amazingly rigorous, serious parents who don't have steaks, you know? No waste."

Matthews went on to Holy Cross in Worcester (class of '67) , after which he entered the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill as a doctoral student in economics. A year into the program, however, it became clear that Uncle Sam was preparing to draft him into service in Vietnam.

"And it was literally a draft," Matthews says. "It was cold and it was coming, and it made you think very creatively about what you were going to do with your life. There were plenty of ways to dodge combat and still make everybody at home happy, but you could easily waste, or end up in the wrong place for, two or three years of your life."

Although it caused him inner turmoil at the time, Matthews today is glad he resisted pressure from his parents to do his duty as a soldier. "I don't know anybody who went to Vietnam that I've envied," he says. "I don't know that they thought they were doing enough good to justify the hell they were putting up with and the hell they were inflicting."

Instead, Matthews chose to join the Peace Corps, teaching business skills in Swaziland in southern Africa. Before being accepted as a volunteer, however, he had to persuade Peace Corps trainers that he was committed to their values and not just looking for an easy way out of the draft. "There were about four or five of us they sort of spotted as guys they thought didn't have the full culturally sensitive attitude," Matthews says with a chuckle.

However shaky his initial motives may have been, Matthews says he returned from the Peace Corps a changed man. Noticing a new strength in him - and a wider, more tolerant, vision of the world - his Irish grandmother pulled him aside upon his return, looked him in the eye, and said, "It was Africa, wasn't it?"

"I never went to church for two years over there, except for once," he says now, "and yet it was a spiritual event. It got me out of a rut, totally out of my old culture. I was the one who was different from the majority. It was the most enlightening thing. I was often very lonely, but I basically had an amazing growing-up experience in Africa.

"You can actually transcend where you come from," he adds, "and move into another world which is not lower or higher, but different. It becomes, at some point, extremely warm and familiar. And I think it could happen a lot more in this country if we did more mixing around."

Riding out to rural villages on a motorbike, a young Matthews would meet with Swazi businessmen in their 50s, many of them veterans of World War II, whom he looked up to as father figures. "These were independent guys, and to some extent I was their servant. I worked for their government," he says. Speaking in Zulu, the predominant regional language, he taught development strategies and learned to bridge cultures.

"I hope I did something for the country," says Matthews. "I definitely came out of it ahead."

Matthews is still a man who values the opinions of elders. Especially those he'd like to think of as colleagues, such as Bill Kovach, a longstanding veteran of

the New York Times and currently head of Harvard's Nieman Foundation.

Kovach recently coauthored a book (Warp Speed) reviewing the media's conduct during the Lewinsky scandal, which cites Matthews as a prime agent of "the argument culture's impact on journalism." The book also accuses Matthews of joining the ranks of "a new class of chatterers who emerged in this scandal ... a group of loosely credentialed, self-interested performers whose primary job is remaining on TV ... [and who] helped turn the Clinton-Lewinsky affair into a kind of national Truman Show."

For all of Matthews's apparent eagerness to skewer public figures on Hardball, he is surprisingly wounded when criticism is aimed at him. As cp9.5NBCcp10.5's Fineman says: "He's not thin-skinned. He has no skin." Matthews takes bitter offense at first to Kovach's assessment, then offers a plaintive defense, citing his many years and roles in politics as reasons why he is now qualified to interpret the news for broadcast.

When he returned from the Peace Corps, in 1971, Matthews headed for Capitol Hill with little money but lots of conviction that he was cut out for politics as it's played at the top. After knocking on endless doors, however, the best job he was able to land was a patronage position on the Capitol Hill police force, working the 3 to 11 p.m. shift. In exchange, he was expected to spend mornings and early afternoons volunteering in the office of Sen. Frank Moss (D-Utah). "That was the way they used to do it back then," says Matthews, who was soon promoted to a paid legislative assistant's job on Moss's staff.

Matthews also worked for several years as an aide to Sen. Edmund Muskie (D-Maine) and the Senate Budget Committee, and for a shorter stint as a congressional correspondent for a small news service underwritten by Ralph Nader.

In 1974, Matthews ran for office himself, running a respectable but losing congressional campaign to represent his old neighborhood in Philadelphia. "It was the most courageous thing I ever did," he says. "Imagine the hubris! What right did I have to run for Congress? I was a nobody. I didn't have any money. I just simply said I will run, I will do this. It was definitely gutsy, that's for sure. Scared the hell out of me."

But it paid off. An obscure governor named Jimmy Carter who was then gathering grass-roots support for an outsider's run at the presidency sought out candidates who had lost congressional elections that year, including Matthews. The contact helped land him a job in the White House after Carter was elected in 1976. Hired first to work on the president's pet project of government reorganization, Matthews soon became a first-string speech writer for Carter.

"As a writer, he was undisciplined," says his former White House boss, Hertzberg. "A speech draft would be a mess. But it would be a highly fixable mess. Every other word might be misspelled, because he'd be writing in such a rush. But it would have phrases and ideas and an argument in it - elements that are more important than good penmanship. He wrote political poetry. And to be able to do that, you have to know the political lay of the land."

When Carter lost his reelection bid to Republican Ronald Reagan, Matthews moved back to Capitol Hill and became a senior aide to Tip O'Neill, who as speaker of the House became the opposition leader and national spokesman for the Democratic Party.

"It was a great job, a tough job," Matthews says. "Best work I ever did. Hardest six years of my life. The stress was unending. ... Every time Reagan said something, we'd have to react to it. It was the big show in terms of media wars, because Reagan was the `great communicator,' and he zeroed in on Speaker O'Neill early on, thought he'd be an easy target. But [O'Neill] came out of that experience stronger than he went into it, and he was actually happier, I think."

O'Neill remained sensitive, however, to the ways the press lampooned him as he attracted more of the media spotlight. It made Matthews, who came to love his boss fight all the harder for him. "It used to bug him, the way they made fun of his nose and his `cabbage' ears," Matthews says, "adding that cartoon quality to the fact that people called him a `metaphor for the old breed.' He used to say, with disgust, `I'm no metaphor.'

"He was very good on sort of the gold-digging, grab-the-money-while-you-can attitude of the Reagan crowd. He had a real Depression-era concern for people who were down and out. `Government programs' were nice words to him, comforting words. He wouldn't be offended a bit if somebody called him a `tax-and-spend liberal.' He'd say, `Of course, you gotta tax. Where else is the money gonna come from?'

"I helped him a lot because I could hear the other arguments. I came from an environment that wasn't liberal. I could say, `Well, if you're going to win with these people, you gotta argue differently. You can't talk like Walter Mondale. It won't work.' "

After O'Neill retired, in 1987, Matthews briefly became head of the Government Research Corp., a for-profit think tank. Finding himself unsuited to corporate life, however, he was thrilled when the San Francisco Examiner offered him a twice-weekly column, which is widely syndicated. He took a serious pay cut to become the Examiner's Washington bureau chief, then began popping up occasionally on television, talking about politics, and thereby launched a new career.

As he looks back, Matthews sees nothing "presto!" about his transition from politico to pundit. "If it's so easy," he asks, "why doesn't everybody do it?" Nor does he consider himself "loosely credentialed," as described by Kovach and his coauthor, Tom Rosenstiel of Columbia University's Project for Excellence in Journalism.

"I have been following American politics since I was, I don't know, preteen," says Matthews. "I have been working in it full time since I came back from the Peace Corps, which was in itself a political experience. I don't know how you can get a better apprenticeship in terms of understanding the subject matter, although it was a hell of an extended one. Is there another standard besides experience and knowledge of the substance? If it's discipline, I haven't missed a deadline since 1987. If it's independence, I think that's manifest and obvious to all.

"I don't know. People have their own reasons for writing these critiques. And there's always validity to every criticism, and I accept that. But when knocks are made, and they ignore all the contrary evidence, all the years of working for people at pretty high levels, and then it's convenient to suggest I just walked in from somewhere else, and I'm the golden boy? Where does that come from?

"Twenty-eight years of writing for people who get credit for what I write. I mean, that's just the norm in this city; I'm not complaining. But the idea that I didn't serve years in silent anonymity and didn't pay my dues, to say that it wasn't an adequate credential to write under my own name now? To write speeches for just about everybody and not be able to speak myself?"

Matthews has not always been so sure of himself, which is why he quit drinking five years ago. "Here's how it starts," he says. "You have wine at dinner, drink the whole bottle. Order a second bottle, have a hangover all the next day. Friday night, you sit around, watch an old movie, finish a bottle of wine, feels great. But you notice the kids don't like it. I know I was never trained to be a social drinker. I could never do what my wife does automatically - have a glass of wine that you sip for a half-hour at a party. My idea is it's an IV. I never thought of it as anything but a flow.

"I really do believe there's a genetic problem. You know, it's us [Irish] and the American Indians. We've got this problem, and it's there, and anybody who doesn't see it is a fool or a liar."

There's this, too, he says about drinking: "It encourages mediocrity. People get to a certain level - I don't care if they went to BC Law or Harvard Law - a lot of people from my background, at the age of 35, they are basically stalled. They sit around and they talk, but there's nothing there, nothing happening. They got their little law degree, they got their cottage at the Cape, and that's it."

Matthews realized that if he was going to make it big in TV, he had to be able to trust himself. "With a show like Hardball, it's all based on sort of impulse and a kind of careful sense of what you can say that can be provocative and even flippant but not harmful to you or someone else. And if you don't operate on that level of the game, trying to score some aces now and then, it'll be a boring show. If you're hungover and worried and guilty about what you drank the night before, I think you lose all sense of confidence and start making mistakes."

Stopping drinking wasn't easy, Matthews says. "I'm proud of it. It was a big decision. And I do think, once in a while, about if I ever went back to it, what a calamity it would be. And I think I'm so lucky."

On Hardball, it's relatively easy to keep score. Tracking Matthews's batting average is a different matter. He's an occasional switch-hitter who surprises viewers sometimes with the stances he takes.

For example, in Matthews's frequent monologues, women are often still "girls," while men "lock the doors and turn off the lights at night." But despite such retro gender guidelines, he's fully capable of outbursts that sound positively progressive, coming from him.

Discussing allegations of womanizing that were launched against Republican presidential candidate Gary Bauer after he met with a top female aide behind closed doors, Matthews offered his version of "what really goes on in politics ... What happens is, you'll have a general meeting with lots of diversity - racial, ethnic, gender - and everybody sits around a table like this, and everybody feels like they have a piece of the action. The guys have been drinking coffee in the meeting. They head off for the men's room, and that's where you have the real meeting. It seems to me you want to discourage that, right?"

In Matthews's vocabulary, communists are still derisively called "commies," and "lefties" are laughed at. But he's also been known to pipe up in favor of causes he glowingly describes as "socialistic," such as a living wage or health care for everyone who works.

Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-Mississippi) can come on Hardball gushing like an acolyte about how "thoroughly" he enjoys the show, watching it "almost every night." The next night, Matthews might conduct an uncharacteristically softball interview with someone like the civil rights activist the Rev. Al Sharpton of New York.

"I can't come on the show like the [Harlem] Globetrotters," Matthews says of his strategy of selecting guests. "I gotta let the other side win once in a while, OK? I'm trying to make it so the other side can be heard."

In some ways, Matthews compares himself to an "Ed King Democrat" who grew up with lots of class and ethnic resentments. But, he says, "anger is not enough basis for a political philosophy." He also recognizes that many of his viewers, "people on the Republican right," tune in because they share some of his more culturally conservative leanings. "I'm not disturbed by that," he says. "They think they agree with me. But that's not the end of the story. The conversation has not been completed yet. If they keep watching, they'll understand I disagree with them on about five or six issues they care about," such as abortion rights, gay rights, affirmative action, and gun control, all of which Matthews supports. On the other hand, he says with his wheeze of a laugh, "It's not my job to turn people off to my show!" For now, he's content to keep them guessing on some fronts, as he does sometimes himself.

"Figuring me out is a hard one, isn't it? It's so confused and congested. I don't know. I'm typical. I hate to think of myself as typical, but ..." He pauses again. "I think I'm decent, but I think I'm maybe not as good as I should be. But I don't know."

After a beat, Matthews explains his approach to politics - and life - like this: "My gut is conservative, intellectually I'm more liberal, and I try to let my heart decide the issue."