Tom Brokaw as Veep?

Sometimes, ideas in politics come from so far out in, er, left field, that I'm completely blown away. Who would have thought that Tom Brokaw was a credible choice for Veep? well... after doing some cursory research into his biography, suddenly I think so too. Brokaw is retiring from his anchor position at NBC and at age 63 is still not too old to switch careers.

Reading over the transcript of Brokaw's moderation of the Iowa Debate, I come away impressed. Even the Village Voice grudgingly admitted that Brokaw did his job well, asking tough questions all around.

I was fascinated to find out that Brokaw dropped in unannounced to the Dean campaign headquarters the day before the Iowa caucuses, to chat with Trippi. A recent Q&A with Brokaw by the CJR asked him about his plans after retiring from NBC, and he also had some comments about Dean's campaign:

The mainstream media initially missed the strength of Howard Dean’s campaign. Was that because Dean was succeeding through the Internet — or because Dean’s message was so strongly antiwar, and the conventional wisdom at the time was that such a message was suicide?

I think it was a combination of those things. I also don’t think that you can discount the tepid response of Dean’s opposition to his early gains — it gave him running room in a way that not even Dean could have anticipated. But this speaks to what’s going on out there — which is that Dean is generating a new constituency of voters in the Democratic Party, and reaching them through the Internet. We’re always a beat behind on that technology.

and here are some comments by Brokaw on the Dean campaign during an interview with Roger Simon:

Tom Brokaw. The ascendancy of Dean is a surprise. To me, not to him! (Laughter)
I think it's a tribute to two or three things. One is that there is a large body of people who feel left out of the process and they feel he can bring them back in or that he's their ticket to get them back in in some fashion. Also, his ability to not be locked into "Washington speak" every time he opens his mouth on a subject. Even to run the risk of saying something that he has to pull back the next day. You know, it helps him.

Roger Simon: Right. His mistakes don’t seem to matter.

Tom Brokaw: It makes him seem human. And then finally, and I think this is partly generational, you cannot overstate for younger voters the place of the Internet in their lives. It's a force. It is the force. They're on it all day long as a means of communication with one another and as a means of retrieving information. It shapes their world. And he tapped into that.

What interests me is the explicit acknowledgement by Brokaw of the real innovation of the Dean campaign, which was to draw people into the political process. If he were to be Kerry's veep, then we can probably be confident that he would bring some of that recognition to the campaign and to the eventual Kerry Administration.