Tom Brokaw Smoked Pot ... and Lived to Tell About It!

From a partial transcript of Barbara Walters' interview with former NBC colleague Tom Brokaw on her Sirius radio program on January 28:

BARBARA WALTERS: Did you inhale [marijuana]?

TOM BROKAW: Sure.

BARBARA WALTERS: OK, well, dumb question, Barbara...well how could you not in those days right?

BARBARA WALTERS: ...What about coke?

TOM BROKAW: Never did it. Not interested in it....what I did was experiment with a little marijuana like a lot of other people and walked away...

In that same interview -- excerpted on Media Bistro's TV Newser blog -- Brokaw expresses some optimism about the 2008 election, saying that its results will not be the consequence of racism or sexism. Answering a question about the prospects of Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama, Brokaw said:

A lot of people have said to me, is this country prepared to elect a woman? Is this country prepared to elect a black man? And my line has been, if either of them don't get elected, it will be for issues other than race or gender which I really believe that. I think that they both have done extraordinarily well up to this point; both of them. And race and gender has not had a whole lot to do with it. Race did come into play in South Carolina. I was down there the Monday before and a lot of my young, African American friends, and I do have several in South Carolina, said to me: It's kind of a generational split going on here. The older folks are worried that if they vote for him he won't be able to win next fall because he's a black man. And I looked around at the Martin Luther King rally and I thought, I don't care what age you are, if you live in South Carolina and you're an African American and you can go into the voting booth tomorrow and vote for a credible African American presidential candidate forty years after the death of Dr. King, you're going to do that and with good reason.

Brokaw's comments came before the Florida primary. We'll see what he's saying next Tuesday night.