It was fun to watch Chris Matthews and Keith Olbermann preside over MSNBC’s coverage of the Pennsylvania primary the other night. One suspects these two significant cable yakkers don’t much like each other, though they behave as if affably inclined.

They seem united, however, in their distaste for Senator Clinton. To see them have to concede her victory over Barack Obama, who is MSNBC’s pin-up boy, was great television.

Matthews at least tends to give Hillary a kind of half-admiring thumbs-up for stick-to-it-ness. But he was so anxious to offer that the results “were too close to call” that he misread the clock at 7:30 PM, saying it was 8 PM. (As the results came in with Hillary leading, I received a call from a pal who joked, “Chris Matthews has lost the power of speech!” Fascinating and likable as he can be, sometimes when Chris is interviewing dignified and mature spokespersons, you can see the pain on their faces as he repeatedly interrupts them and they are too decent to shout back.)

Chris Matthews © AP

Olbermann for his part looked kind of grim and tight-lipped. He behaved better than he usually does but one feels he was itching to scream, “Why won’t she go away?” (Once she does, things will turn very dull for all these mediacasters, so I don’t see why they are so anxious for that result. They’ll be sorry if they don’t have Hillary to kick around anymore.)

Senator Clinton has it slightly easier at MSNBC now that Tucker Carlson has bitten the dust. But it’s still a frat house over there and the “tingle down the leg” that Hillary generates is one of fear and frustration. (That was Chris Matthews’s famous reaction to Obama’s oratory abilities, if you’ll recall.)

Only the network’s brilliant numbers-cruncher analyst Chuck Todd keeps a cool, on-the-ball detachment.

Keith Olbermann © AP

Mr. Olbermann is the somewhat (but not always) liberal doppelganger of his arch enemy, conservative pundit, Bill O’Reilly. They really should meet in person, perhaps in the ring. And Olbermann is extremely tiresome when he tries to imitate O’Reilly’s voice. There is this ideological chasm between the two, but they share a sense of towering ego, self-righteousness and seem to be twin entities. Maybe they cancel one another out. (O’Reilly won’t utter Olbermann’s name and has attacked NBC relentlessly hoping to drive Keith out. But the latter has made big mileage from directly attacking O’Reilly, who is Roger Ailes’s great star at Fox News.)

Sometimes I think the young idiots at MTV’s “The Real World,” now in its 20th terrible year, behave more maturely than some of the big guys who are positioned to give us what is laughingly called “hard news” and what is mostly egotistical analysis.

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