On Wednesday’s “Morning Joe” on MSNBC, former NBC “Nightly News” anchor and MSNBC regular Tom Brokaw reacted to the election results the night before, which proved to be a big Republican night.
Brokaw first advised Republicans not to follow in the footsteps of former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who had an unceremonious fall from grace.
“Is it a seismic shift that will last a long time? I think you have to be careful. You remember Newt Gingrich goes in ’94, ‘Contract for America,’ he lights up the Republican site and gone within a couple of years beus president, Bill Clinton, at that point, completely outfoxed him on that. It does remind me, however, of the morning after Gingrich and the morning after Reagan was elected president of the United States in 1980. It was a different country the next day. We had the Republican conservative out of the West come in to Washington. But he was the president. This is the Congress. Democrats still have the White House. The question is, how does the White House deals with all this?”
But he also went on to say President Barack Obama should react by sending Vice President Joe Biden to Capitol Hill to be front and center in dealing with the U.S. Congress.
“If you read the Ronald Reagan diaries, which I always recommend to people – he kept a diary every night,” Brokaw said. “He talked about compromise, the importance of it, you know, raising taxes. He said Jack Kemp came in and gave him unbridled hell. He says, he doesn’t understand, to get things done, you got to find the middle somehow. Somebody very familiar with the Obama White House said to me last night, send Joe Biden to the Hill. That should be their point man. The president doesn’t like to do this kind of stuff. Biden loves it and he’s pretty good at it and he knows them. But they’re starting from a deep deficit obviously.”
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