Tom Brokaw: Talk Radio Thinks ‘Obama Voters…Live In Excrement’

Tom Brokaw, former anchor of NBC Nightly News, had a busy midterm election night as he appeared on both NBC and PBS’s midterm coverage programming. During Brokaw’s appearances on the two networks, he repeatedly minimized [1] the significance of the GOP’s electoral victory.

During his appearance on the PBS program Charlie Rose, Brokaw disgustingly claimed that talk radio hosts insist “Obama's voters are people who live in excrement. That was his phrase. And they expect us to lift them out of excrement.”

The former NBC anchor began his rant by complaining that Obama “gets hammered 24/7 by Fox News on the right and by talk radio which is a huge voice in this country” before bizarrely trashing talk radio:

I was in the Midwest the other day listening to talk radio, I don’t know who the guy was, but he's saying Obama's voters are people who live in excrement. That was his phrase. And they expect us to lift them out of excrement. I'm not going to lift a hand. That was the kind of language that was going on. At some point that penetrates. 

Conveniently, Tom Brokaw never named the talk radio host who supposedly said Obama voters “live in excrement” but that didn’t stop him from using this anonymous talker as an excuse to slam all of conservative talk radio.

See relevant transcript below.

PBS’s Charlie Rose

November 4, 2014

TOM BROKAW: Imagine if Bill Clinton had been in office and the gains that Al [Hunt] ticked off had been made about the stock market were back. I mean he would have been all over the country and when the president came back from his re-election and wanted to reach out to Congress what did he do? He took them to dinner at the Jefferson Hotel. I couldn't believe that. I don’t know anybody in Washington whose knees don't buckle when they walk into the White House. Up in the family room, serve them drinks, how do we get past this? And come out of the West Wing with his arms around him. But he was sliding off to the Jefferson Hotel. 

Now a lot of this also has to do with the fact that he gets hammered 24/7 by Fox News on the right and by talk radio which is a huge voice in this country. I was in the Midwest the other day listening to talk radio, I don’t know who the guy was, but he's saying Obama's voters are people who live in excrement. That was his phrase. And they expect us to lift them out of excrement. I'm not going to lift a hand. That was the kind of language that was going on. At some point that penetrates. 

I think he's been an imperfect president in lot of ways. You look back on moving the line in Syria, not catching up to how the rollout of ObamaCare or Affordable Care Act was not going to go well when we knew about it. And being kind of uncertain. 

You know the most telling thing about the last, the accounts of the last election for me was when he was in that first debate which he ended up losing to Romney. We all agree on that right? So they’re preparing him and he’s sitting off in the corner and he said guys this is not who I am. If that's not who you are, why are you running for president?