Veteran journalist Tom Brokaw said Tuesday Republicans and Democrats in Congress bear equal blame for the partial government shutdown, chiding Democratic freshmen for indulging in "pep rallies" instead of governance.
Brokaw, who anchored "NBC Nightly News" for 22 years, said the government shutdown was a national embarrassment and called the ongoing situation "chaos." He said Democrats are neither negotiating seriously with Republicans nor executing a larger political strategy.
"I think the Democrats are as much to blame right now as the Republicans are," Brokaw said. "They have control of the House but they're mostly like, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah, we're not going to do what you want to do.’ I haven't seen a grand plan."
He was particularly dismissive of younger members receiving media attention for pushing the party to the left, presumably including representatives such as Ilhan Omar (D., Minn.) and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.), the latter of whom received attention for her use of social media in the halls of the Capitol.
"You have the young members running through the halls conducting pep rallies every day, instead of getting together with the more moderate people or the people from the midwest who have won in Ohio, Wisconsin and Minnesota where they need to win again if they're going to get the control. But they're being driven hard by the left," he said.
Brokaw contrasted the current situation in Washington to President Richard Nixon handling a foreign policy crisis—Egypt’s invasion of Israel—even as his administration was being buried under mounting political turmoil.
"I've been looking into the last year of Richard Nixon. That was extraordinarily well run and organized compared to what's going on now," Brokaw said. "He was under siege, obviously. People forget that in October of 1973, Israel almost went down because it was invaded by Egypt and by Syria with the backing of the Russians."
He concluded by saying voters expected members of Congress to come together to solve the problem of the budget impasse.
"It's a time of great chaos, is what I think," he said, "and as I talk to people around the country—in Montana, in California, in Texas, I was there last week, and in Florida—they say the same thing, 'Can't they get together? When are they going to get together and talk to each other?'"