Despite the Republicans dramatically retaking the Senate, increasing their majority in the House and upping the number of GOP governors, veteran NBC journalist Tom Brokaw on Tuesday night insisted, "I don't think that this was a big, ideological election, as much as it was 'we want to change the team.'" [MP3 audio here.] The ex-NBC Nightly News anchor put the responsibility on Republicans: "Will [voters] fall out of love with Republicans that they have elected to office? That all depends on how the Republicans take control of the Senate now and the Congress."
Sounding a bit cranky, Brokaw continued, "Does [Mitch] McConnell back away from repealing, for example, Affordable Care? Will we not hear about Benghazi again for a while and all the other issues that have been coming up?"
Brokaw lectured, "It was not so long ago a lot of Republicans said impeach the President. Do they want to go there? That's not the message that the country has sent."
Earlier in the evening, a confused Brokaw was interrupted live on television as his cell phone rang.
A transcript of the November 4 exchange with Brian Williams is below:
10:52
BRIAN WILLIAMS: What have we learned so far tonight?
TOM BROKAW: Well, they're [voters] plainly unhappy. I don't think that this was a big, ideological election as much as it was "we want to change the team. We want to find somebody who can get things done." Will they fall out of love with Republicans that they have elected to office? That all depends on how the Republicans take control of the Senate now and the Congress. They're going to be looking at 2016. No one wants to go into the presidential election with the attitude that the country had going into this election. And to change all of that, they're going to have to get some things done.
They're going to have to reach across the lines a little bit. When Portman and even McConnell and others are talking about "now we have a chance for tax reform" and so on, that means the Democrats are going to have a place at the table as well. So I think we've got a long way to go and it's very hard, at this point, to conjecture about how they may behave. Does McConnell back away from repealing, for example, Affordable Care? Will we not hear about Benghazi again for a while and all the other issues that have been coming up? It was not so long ago a lot of Republicans said impeach the President. Do they want to go there? That's not the message that the country has sent.
