Karen Heller: We're left with a softball game

Chris, you're breaking our heart.

Last week, MSNBC Hardball host Chris Matthews said he wouldn't run for the Democratic nomination to face five-term Republican Sen. Arlen Specter, making a veritable triple play of disappointment.

In one fell swoop, he dashed hopes of putting Pennsylvania politics in the national spotlight, providing us with a candidate with severe logorrhea equal to the governor's, and creating the potential sibling equivalent of James Carville and Mary Matalin, in that his brother Jim is a GOP commissioner in Montgomery County.

"Chris is more sensitive than me," Jim said yesterday of the lone Democrat in his family. "And it came down to a quality-of-life issue."

Sure, for him.

"There's a wonderful power in being able to get up in the morning and do and say what you believe," Chris Matthews told The Inquirer's Thomas Fitzgerald. "As long as I'm decent and don't use bad words, I can do pretty much anything I want."

Doesn't he realize that as a candidate, he could do and say whatever he wanted any weekday, even forgoing that decency business, on the commonwealth's premiere political forum, WIP's Morning Show?

With this sad decision, Matthews banished Pennsylvania once again to the back pages, doomed to another race with likely candidates so dull and unthreatening to Specter that

Hardball

won't squander air time on the matter.

Meanwhile, Illinois keeps hogging the limelight. First the president-elect, then the governor, now the Senate. In appointing Roland Burris to fill Barack Obama's vacant Senate seat, Rod Blagojevich, who nicknamed his Paul Mitchell hairbrush "the football," perfected a Dr. Evil move that may go down in history for its twisted logic.

Burris, endorsed by Senate leaders yesterday, manages to combine crushing mediocrity with raging ego, making him the only man willing to accept Blagojevich's blessing. He has alredy erected a mausoleum chiseled with the title "Trail Blazer" and his achievements, while naming both his children, male and female, after himself.

At least George Foreman has two heavyweight championships and an impressive grill to his credit.

Al Franken, Minnesota's apparent Frozen Chosen by 225 votes, asked to be seated in the Senate yesterday, in a race that couldn't be scripted. Former Gov. Jesse Ventura has suggested that Franken and Norm Coleman stage a "Senatorial Smackdown" at St. Paul's Xcel Center. You have to wonder how Coleman feels, having lost the governor's race to a pro wrestler nicknamed "the Body" and now the Senate race to Stuart Smalley.

In New York, the once Garbo-like Caroline Kennedy seeks the senator's seat being vacated by Hillary Clinton, the job Uncle Bobby once held, solidifying the office's status as the Brangelina of U.S. politics.

An aide to state Attorney General Andrew Cuomo is quietly lobbying upstate against Kennedy, the New York Times reports. Cuomo had a messy divorce from Bobby's daughter, Kerry, who is Caroline's cousin. Dynastic food fight! It doesn't get this sordid on Gossip Girl.

When Pennsylvania gets a dynasty, it's the stolid Caseys - though big points, Bob, on shooting hoops with Obama - or remains quarantined in Philadelphia City Council. Politicians think local and act small, nifty for constituent service but nothing for the national limelight. Dare we dream of another James Buchanan?

Now, Chris, you've abandoned us to remain among cable's incessant chattering classes. The election that would have launched enough verbiage to fell forests and test our collective stamina is but an elusive fantasy. Instead, we prepare to meet another set of names-to-be-forgotten legislators as they battle across 67 counties for months. Oh, if only Keith Olbermann hailed from Lackawanna County.