“What This A@# Said”

REPORT: Frustrated Barbara Buono Unloads On Chris Matthews After Disastrous ‘Hardball’ Interview

By Matt Rooney | The Save Jersey Blog

I told you that Barbara Buono‘s early April appearance on Hardball with Chris Matthews would come back to the haunt her campaign, Save Jerseyans. I’ve got an eye for this stuff. You will see some of her lines from that appearance again in the form of GOP paid media. Count on it.

The haunting is just happening a little sooner than expected. Our state’s general public still isn’t really paying attention (they likely won’t tune in until September/October if they do at all), but inside Democrat circles, fundraising enthusiasm for Buono’s gubernatorial bid to unseat Chris Christie is so unusually sluggish that the Middlesex County state senator might become the first gubernatorial candidate in NJ history to fail to qualify for matching funds since the program began. That’s not the kind of history Buono intended to make.

Don’t think for a moment that the Matthews interview didn’t serve to exacerbate an already bad situation however low of an opinion you may’ve already had of Sen. Buono. I’ve spoken to more than one connected Democrat over the last week from outside the New Jersey sphere of influence; they were less-than-impressed with Buono as a presumptive nominee and I’m presenting the sanitized version. Their opinion was largely formed by the botched Hardball appearance.

Buono knows it, too, and apparently she’s pretty angry over it…

Check out what Buono allegedly told Buzzfeed‘s Ruby Cramer about the fateful interview’s aftermath:

Off the air, the host makes a sort of peace offering: “Oh, I was tough on you.”

Buono disagreed. “I wasn’t gonna give him the satisfaction,” she later recalled, two weeks after the April interview. “I said, ‘No you weren’t.’ And he said, ‘But don’t worry, people will all just be talking about how you were on Hardball.'”

“That’s what this ass said,” Buono added, standing outside a campaign event in Bayonne, N.J., just about six months out from Election Day. “It’s early in the campaign. I’ll remember that. But it’s hard to know how to handle it, particularly as a woman. It’s just hard. I keep thinking how I would have done it differently.”

Her reportedly blunt description of Chris Matthews may be the first and last thing that Senator Buono and I every agree on, Save Jerseyans.

The ironic part? I used the word “last” deliberately. We’ll likely have less opportunities to disagree in the future thanks to the arch-liberal MSNBC host whose condescending line of questioning did more to harm Buono’s chances of another tenure in Trenton than any Republican attack ad. What did Buono and her team really expect from a guy that was “glad” Hurricane Sandy hit when it did? Calling him an “ass” is the understatement of the century.

Granted, a carpenter is only as good as his tools. Buono is a horrible candidate without help from anyone else! I noted at the time how she seemed woefully underprepared for the spotlight. But isn’t the notoriously nasty Matthews supposed to be on her team? You’d have never known it by watching the interview…