(A disclaimer that advances this notion of incestuousness: I have been a guest on “Hardball” on occasion, but probably not more than a half-dozen times over the years. The New York Times also has a partnership with NBC in which the news organizations coordinate some aspects of their political coverage, posting politics-related stories and videos on each other’s Web sites. And Matthews and I have the same book agent, for what that’s worth.)

“People are a little impressed with themselves,” Griffin went on to say, continuing his commentary about the scene. “It’s a bit of an echo chamber.” Matthews is central to that echo chamber  at the Ritz, as in the 2008 presidential campaign. He is, in a sense, the carnival barker at the center of it, spewing tiny pellets of chewed nuts across the table while comparing Obama to Mozart and Clinton to Salieri. At one point, Matthews suddenly became hypnotized by a TV over the bar set to a rebroadcast of “Hardball.” “Hey, there I am  it’s me,” he said, staring at himself on the screen. “It’s me.”

There is a level of ubiquity about Chris Matthews today that can be exhausting, occasionally edifying and, for better or worse, central to what has become a very loud national conversation about politics. His soothing-like-a-blender voice feels unnervingly constant in a presidential campaign that has drawn big interest, ratings and voter turnout. He gets in trouble sometimes and has to apologize  as he did after suggesting that Hillary Clinton owed her election to the Senate to the fact that her husband “messed around.” He is also something of a YouTube sensation: see Chris getting challenged to a duel by the former Georgia governor, Zell Miller; describing the “thrill going up my leg” after an Obama speech; dancing with (and accidentally groping) Ellen DeGeneres on her show; shouting down the conservative commentator Michelle Malkin; ogling CNBC’s Erin Burnett. And he has provided a running bounty of material for Media Matters for America, a liberal media watchdog, which has devoted an entire section of its Web site (“The Matthews Monitor”) to cataloging Matthews’s alleged offenses, especially against Hillary Clinton and women generally.

Image Credit... Olaf Blecker for The New York Times

In addition to doing “Hardball,” Matthews is the host of a Sunday morning show on NBC, “The Chris Matthews Show,” has been a staple of the network’s coverage of presidential debates and has helped moderate two of them. He is also a frequent guest on NBC and MSNBC news shows and an ongoing spoof target on “Saturday Night Live.” It can be difficult not to hear Darrell Hammond’s long-running impression of Matthews when Matthews himself is speaking. Matthews, for his part, says he loves the Hammond impression and sometimes catches himself “doing Hammond doing Matthews.” If parody is an emblem of pop-culture status  signifying a measure of permanence  Matthews belongs on any Mount Rushmore of political screaming heads.

Matthews is as pure a political being as there is on TV. He is the whip-tongued, name-dropping, self-promoting wise guy you often find in campaigns, and in the bigger offices on Capitol Hill or K Street. (“Rain Man,” NBC’s Brian Williams jokingly called Matthews, referring to his breadth of political knowledge.) He wrote speeches for Jimmy Carter, worked as a top advisor to Tip O’Neill, ran unsuccessfully for Congress himself in his native Philadelphia at 28. In an age of cynicism about politics, Matthews can be romantic about the craft, defensive about its practitioners and personally affronted when someone derides Washington or “the game.” He can also be unsparing in his criticism of those who run afoul of his “take.” “I am not a cheerleader for politics per se,” Matthews says. “I am a cheerleader for the possibilities of politics.”

This election season, MSNBC has placed great emphasis on politics, devoting 28 percent of its airtime to the subject last year (compared with 15 percent for Fox News and 12 percent for CNN, according to the Project for Excellence in Journalism). The thrilling 2008 presidential campaign has been a boon, and in the first quarter MSNBC’s prime-time audience rose 63 percent over the previous year (compared with 12 percent for the Fox News Channel and 70 percent for CNN, though MSNBC still draws many fewer viewers overall). As Matthews is clearly a signature figure on the network, and one of the most recognizable political personalities on the air, this has been something of a heyday for him.