Tom Brokaw: Bernie Sanders Can Win Nomination if He Wins California

My favorite theory of politics, every cycle, is what I call the UFO theory — the unforeseen will occur. I never get involved in who’s going to win and who’s going to lose at the beginning or even midway through, but what I try to do is describe the consequences of what may happen and what the possibilities are here. Bernie Sanders is on a roll. He’s ramping up at this point, and she’s got difficulties.

The country is half-cocked in the ticked off position. They’re willing to pull the pin on the grenade and roll it into the process and kind of frag the process if you will. So that means that the younger voters in California who have no attachment to Hillary — she’s been around for a long time. This guy comes along and says a lot of unrealistic things about free healthcare, free college, that kind of thing, but he’s obviously touching a big political nerve.

Bannon followed up by asking if the political establishment in both parties and the intellectual and cultural elite have failed the country and thus paved the way for the populist uprisings in both the Republican and Democrat primaries. Brokaw responded by saying:

I think what they’ve done is separate themselves from the country. I think they didn’t listen to the country before this cycle. It’s become a kind of self-continuing process in Washington. Everybody, because of gerrymandering, Democrats and Republicans are generally in good shape about getting back.

They live good lives. They spend a lot of their time just raising money. You know, when I was growing up, the Congressmen would come back and walk Main Street. Now they go to a country club and raise dough. So, I think there is a real profound separation. On the other hand, I think there are so many more strengths in this country than people are now willing to acknowledge. We’re in better shape than most people think that we are, in terms of prosperity, and we’re making gains in medical care and other areas.

Brokaw also spoke about the challenges and changes faced by the American working and middle classes:

Ten, twelve years ago I was out in the middle of Ohio talking about the lost American dream; about manufacturing disappearing from places like Toledo, Ohio, which is the home of Libby Glass at that time, and other places; about how the working class had changed in Detroit. Now everybody was on the run. They’d get an assignment in the morning, and they’d have to go to Cincinnati or they’d have to go to different places. On the other hand, you do see those sounds where they said, ‘Okay, we’ve got to reinvent ourselves, you know, that era is gone. We’ve got to find a new way of doing things.’ They’ve been enterprising at doing it.

A perfect example right now for me is that because of this anti-tax attitude, when gas prices got down to where they are, I thought why couldn’t we have a five cent gasoline tax for public works — it’s not going to hurt anybody, really, in the long haul — and start working on our infrastructure? I was just in Europe, and a lot of the European countries have better highways than we do, you know, more secure bridges. We need to do that. We need to do the work in this country, and that would have created some jobs.

When I was eight-years-old, we moved to the center of South Dakota where they were building an enormous flood control and hydroelectric dam, Fort Randall. Three thousand workers moved in there. These were people who came out of the Depression, fought the war, and were looking for a good job, and they got a good job for ten years. Their children, me included and my friends, who went on to become journalists, lawyers, doctors and others and are giving back in a new way. That was a big government project that at the time was needed and at the time that the government was deep in debt. We gotta have a little more flexibility is what I think.

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