sums up the story about how we got here. >> this holiday weekend, watchable tv on c-span2 -- watch book tv on c-span2. >> tonight, former president bill clinton excess the dole leadership prize. then, interviews with colin the press secretary from this year's washington ideas for him. and then i look at the white house christmas decorations and the annual christmas tree lighting ceremony. the bob dole institute of politics awarded this year's dole leadership prize the former president bill clinton. in his speech, president clinton talked about bipartisanship, equality and international affairs. this is one hour. >> the dole leadership prize is

awarded annually to an individual or group that has served our country in an exemplary manner. previous recipients include president george h w bush, the women air force pilots of world others.forme among today's recipient is receiving the award for his presidency and his ability to work on a bipartisan basis to achieve many of his administration's su ccesses. there is a $25,000 award that goes with a prize. i'm klees the to announce that our recipient has chosen to donate -- pleased to announce that our recipient has chosen to donate it back to the dole institute. [applause] that money will feed our new women in leadership lecture which we plan to introduce. our recipient's commitment to

bipartisanship can be fully seen in one of the thousands amazing artifacts from the dole institute archive. it is a handwritten note on a white house card from 1997 that i enjoyed"dear, bob, our visit. if a dog can reach out to a cat, who knows what wonders of cooperation the next year might hold? sincerely, bill." [applause] it is my great honor to welcome to the university of kansas and the dole institute the recipient of the 2015 dole leadership prize and the 42nd president, president bill clinton. [applause]

president clinton: thank you. much.you very i thank you and barbara for your work at the dole institute. thank you, christina, and the student advisory board members. we just had a picture backstage and they were all organized. i told them when these pictures come out, it will look like you went to a wax museum. [laughter] mug and this old, pasty we gathered around. i want to thank a number of

e with who are her wit whom i have served to work in some capacity or another, including your former governor john carlin. [applause] governor kathleen sibelius who is the secretary of health and human services. [applause] and a man for whom i will, to the end of my life, have a special debt. former congressman jim flattery. thank you for being here. [applause] said to me as jim he walked away -- i'm still number 218. referring to the fact that i

1993d my economic plan in designed to reverse the one bob dole believed in by one vote. it was an expensive vote, though i believe it led to the largest economic expansion in american history in peacetime. for thely, surpluses first time since the 1920's. there are a lot of other people but, too many to mention, bob dole called me a couple of days ago and he said that he was especially grateful given the fact that i'm here to talk about bipartisanship. for two people in this audience who have been both strong supporters of the dole institute sue e me and our family,

llen and harvey. that is the beginning of bipartisanship. i thank them. [applause] sue e my personalank assistant without whom i could not function. a graduate of university of kansas, hannah ricker. she is here today. [applause] march, she always picks kansas and the basketball pool -- in the basketball pool in the office. we go along with her. one of my secret service agents here whose father was one of my detail heads when i was president, he is here. i thank him. [applause]

now have a scheduler and her parents are here. thank you for the millers. also, i can tell her one more time that kansas city has the most complete baseball team i have seen in the last 30 or 40 years. [applause] i want to thank also the chancellor for welcoming me here. 11 years ago, i came here to launch a lecture series. to do with then because i always like bob dole and i always admired him. were,cause even when we we knew we were going to be

running against each other for president, we found a way to work together. i think we need to be serious about this topic today. we can all say we are here at the university, we have comfortable lives, we will be nice to each other. seriousa much more subject. for the polarization of america's politics, as present not just in washington but american life. you just look at how many of our collective bigotries we have in america in the lastation of 100 years. we are less racist than we used to be, less sexist. less religiously bigoted. less homophobic than we used to be. we have one remaining bigotry.

we don't want to be around anyone that disagrees with us. [laughter] we are laughing but you know it is true. we don't even want to watch television news we disagree with. my late mother in law whom i adored lives with hillary in washington when she was a senator and secretary of state until she passed away at almost 92. and she was the most liberal member of our family. but, she forced herself to watch an hour of fox news every day. [laughter] we are laughing and i sat down with her once at the table. we were drinking a cup of coffee watching fox news. i said why do you do this? [laughter] she said, first, i want to know what they are saying and i want

to make sure i can answer it. secondly, nobody is wrong all the time and nobody is right all the time. woman. a remarkable but, i never will forget my little lecture from my mother in law who was then 90 years old. a couple of introductory things i want to say about this and then i will try to give you some examples. in an interdependent age. thethe most -- it is wealthiest country in the world and we are slightly more trade dependent and the percentage of gdp before world war i than we are today. i might caution you in considering this issue seriously opinions in all

the countries of the world thought war was unthinkable between the great economic powers because they were so economically interdependent. wrong.ed out to be that is because none of us are completely economic animals. end, the question of how we relate to each other in america is part of the larger identity challenge that is a function of the age of interdependence which goes beyond trade to travel and basically instantaneous access to information of all kinds. the power of technology like social media. the staggering capacity of the simple cell phone to do good and evil. that is what we live in.

, byheadlines are definition, mostly negative. 2000, the united nations adopted the millennium development goals, calling for big reductions in international poverty and putting girls in schools in equal basis with boys. dealing with the challenges of climate change. we did not meet all those goals but we made a lot of progress. people have moved out of extreme poverty. inare moving towards parity places in educational opportunities for girls and boys. there have been more economic empowerment of women. a lot of it was done by the cell phone. we know a cell phone can be used to detonate a bomb, but when the first president bush and i

worked in south asia after the tsunami more than a decade ago -- i was asked to stay behind for two years to work for the u.n. -- we put every family that had lost a fishing boat back in the water. if the fisherman had been killed and who else wanted a boat, got it. this time, we gave every single one of them a cell phone. for the first time in their lives in indonesia, in southeast india, in sri lanka, they could find out what the price of fish was up and down the coast and average incomes increased by 30%. haramw that boko continues to terrorize northern nigeria and the surrounding areas, but our clinton health access initiative is part of a global effort to save one million children under five from waterboarrne diseases.

80% of all people who die are under five. zinc.50 a person, a packet will save their lives. it is never in the press, but we are making our goals in nigeria and we are working in those same areas. the first thing i want you to know is that in this great age of interdependence, good things and bad things are going on. ast of the bad is rootted in self-concept of negative identity. that is, in order for me to think well of myself, i have to think best oless of you to the extent you are different from me, from my religion or ideology, as i define it.

to the extent that we are making progress, it is almost always the product of networks of cooperation rotted oted in positive identity. i like who i am. i'm proud of my race, gender, whatever it is, but i think what we have in common matters more so why don't we figure out how to work together? what does that have to do with bipartisanship at home? everything. auditoriumthis with a social science survey proving that created cooperation among diverse groups works better than closely held decision-making by like thinking elite. if we can miraculously here identify the person in this audience with the highest iq

and take you to the nearest really cushy room and give you whatever you wanted for the next two days, and the rest of us were locked in this auditorium with stale coffee. then, the same set of questions were fed into this auditorium into that room for two days, we would make the better decisions than the lone genius. there's a book which illustrates it. wickeywritten by james called the wisdom of crowd. if you define success as the empowerment of individuals to improve their well-being and that of their families and communities, groups make better decisions if they are diverse and reach understanding and knowledge. second, you live in a country with a constitution that has made us the longest continuously

existing democracy in history because it mandates compromise. founders almost bent over backwards to slow down the train of un-debated thought. because they were very concerned about the prospect of unlimited government power to do arbitrary things. so, they gave us an executive, legislative and judicial branch. and they gave us state and local authority with explicit responsibilities, not enumerated in the constitution. -- they gave the senate required two thirds vote to pass a treaty or override a veto or t o escape a veto.

thingsd a lot of other basically to say you guys have to work together here. why? because things they were creatuf the enlightened. few finaleve there are victories in politics, in economics, in social policy. they believed the most important thing was the set in motion a progress of debate and resolution, debate and resolution. moving forward. so, that they would be thrilled to see the things going on around the world today that involved multiple stakeholders trying to reach consensus and mortified that the capital is o ften grounded to a halt over ideological divide.

a couple of days ago i was in jacksonville, florida. jacksonville is a fairly large city but the city, county government is united so it is vast. site of my foundation's health matters initiatives to get the people in the community to work together to increase health outcomes. jacksonville has an interesting problem. itinitiatives to get the peoplen the's got the largest amount of urban green space in america. almost 80,000 acres. yet, it has the third highest pedestrian fatality rate in america because of the way those spaces are not connected and not necessarily related to traffic patterns which include people walking around. so, they were all gathered there to talk about how they were

going to get rid of this problem and how they wanted to deal with the other lifestyle related health challenges they face, including reasonably high rates of diabetes and other problems. the point is everybody was there. the republicans and the democrats showed up. the people in health care, the people in business, the people in education -- there was a widely diverse representative group of the ethnic and religious makeup of the county. and they will do that. they willthe republicans and the democrats showed up. succeed in doing what they are trying to do and i urge them to take on the bigger challenges we all face. lot.i think about this a in little rock, where i will spend the night, i have a presidential library and a school of public service.

we offer only graduate programs. one and two-year programs, but half of the time of the students is spent in the field figuring out how to turn their good intentions into positive changes. they find without exception to succeed over the long run, they need partners. so that their identity, i hope, will be more positive. the second president bush and i have joined together in a presidential leadership scholars includes, with the support of his father's library the lbj library -- we just

had our first graduation. it is for younger people in their 30's mostly who are starting out in a wide variety of careers with great promise. it is nothing if not politically diverse. after they spend time going through this program together and then they stood up and told us about their experiences, they felt more strongly than ever that with the right attitude, we can solve the problems of america. and do the right thing in the world. things i always liked about bob dole is that he can fight you like no tomorrow, but he never closed the door to actually doing something that might benefit a real person. there is a big difference. he worked with senator moynihan, my wife's predecessor in the senate in new york, on social security. he worked with senator george mcgovern on the food stamp program. he supported voting rights and its extinction.

-- extension without fail for 25 years. after was president and we had opposed each other in the presidential campaign, he served as chairman of the international commission on missing persons in the former yugoslavia to find out what happened in kosovo and bosnia after the terrible conflicts there. in 2000, bob dole and george mcgovern agreed to help senator jim mcgovern from massachusetts -- no relationship -- and me to pass a $300 million program in the congress to provide a free nutritious meal to children in poor countries but only if they came to school to get the mail. we made it available in the poorest countries in the world

just as we were trying to give debt relief to them in the millennium debt relief initiative. that $300 million increased school enrollment by 6 million. it only cost $50 a person a year then to give them a nutritious meal. he was interested in that. after i left the white house in the aftermath of 9/11, bob dole and i joined together to help f und something called the families of freedom fund. provide we proposed to higher education assistance to the children and spouses of everyone killed or disabled in 9/11 regardless of their citizenship. there were, for example, more than 200 people from the united kingdom who were killed.

there was an enormous amount of racial diversity and no small number of muslims who were killed on 9/11. and, since then, our goal was to raise $100 million. that fund has already awarded $118 million in financial aid. that is something we did together because we thought it was the right thing to do. it has been really rewarding. it has also been good for our country. a lot of you know that senator dole is one of the people behind the americans with disabilities act for good reason. working with primarily democratic senator tom harkin of iowa. a couple of years ago, i saw him in a wheelchair on the floor of the senate asking them to ratify

the international convention on disabilities and explaining to reluctant members of his own party that this would not do anything bad to america because we have the highest standards for disability rights in the entire world. but, it could take people like him when he was young, deeply injured, and give them a chance to have a full oer life. he did not win that fight, but i think eventually we will win it. as long as i live, i reward will remember bob dole in his wheelchair talking to the members of the senate about the imperative of recognizing not only human dignity, but the human potential of everyone without regard of their physical abilities. if you go on the dole institute's website, there is a letter that he wrote about his

recuperation from the wound he suffered in italy. life how he is adapting to with his disabilities. he downplayed the pain and mentioned he got himself elected to the state legislature. degreea degree and a law after the war. that sort of just tacked on. here is what he said -- "the rehabilitation is an endless task. i feel confident that the most difficult period has passed. i have not met any appreciable economic gain, but i have salvaged security out of bitter disappointment by rebuilding satyr dreams and reshaping aspirations. i give thanks to god for this forrtunity which was denied many who made the supreme

sacrifice." dole inerience kept bob tolace that enabled him balance his enormous political skills and his great ambition with the understanding that life is fleeting, things can change and ultimately what makes a democracy work is whether it responds to the challenges of a given moment. that rarely happens when political paralysis takes over. year marked the 20th ofiversary of a number events. which had a lot to do with my themdency, but listen to and think if they have any relevance to our current

challenges. ofs was the 20th anniversary the bombing of the building in oklahoma city. this was the 20th anniversary of the donnybrook we had which led shutdowns,rnment but also in 1996, the passage of the balanced budget bill which gave us three surpluses in a row when i was president. it was the 20th anniversary of the cease-fire of northern ireland which led to peace. the 20th anniversary of ireland's decision to give financial assistance to mexico when it was on the verge of bankruptcy. i have to say that when i hear all this stuff about immigration in mexico, how we need a five-story wall, i never hear anybody say there was no net in

migration of undocumented people in mexico from 2010 to 2014. the numbers went down. they are going down again this year. because we helped them to build a self-sustaining economy. i will talk more about that later because bob dole supported me in that. of the 20th anniversary of the slaughter of a thousand men and in bosnia that led to military action and the end of the bosnian war which claimed one -- a couple hundred thousand lives ,nd made 2.5 million refugees the worst ethnic cleansing since the end of world war ii. most of the victims were european muslims. interestingly enough the late ii called paul

me within two days of the king of saudi arabia, both pleaded with me to do something to save their lives. the 20th anniversary of the normalization of our relationships with vietnam, fda thousand americans were killed in that war. many more vietnamese. they are still working with us to find the remains of soldiers that were lost their. and they are now our strongest ally in southeast asia. why am i telling you all this? shipuse the bipartisan issue is one piece of this huge coming together and the identity -- identity crises that it creates. we live in a world with a lot of instability, with a lot of economic inequality, a world threatened by the growth of

population and the depletion of resources and the looming andter of climate change there is not an end of power but a dispersal of power. so in the face of insecurity the perhapsdictable going to the beginning of humanity and people coming out of caves and stay away.end -- in an interdependent world where you cannot get away, where action anywhere affect people everywhere, it is probably not the best choice which does not mean we should not worry about legitimate security concerns. it just means we cannot escape each other.

question of the 21st century is not whether americans will live together to my but on what terms. the real question is not whether we will live with people all around the world but on what terms. will our independence be positive or negative? human nature being what it is, it is a little bit of both but it is clear that for every one of the young people here, students, for the children you hope to have, the grandchildren i hope you get to see, our job is to build up the positive and reduce the negative forces of our and her dependents. to try to keep big, bad things from happening and make as many good things happen as possible and make sure people understand what the promise as well as the peril is of the age in which we believe it or not,

if i could do it, i would give andeing president to be 20 take my chances because i think there is a good chance this will be a most peaceful, prosperous time in human history, time of breathtaking scientific advances , and which all the bad things we are worried about will probably not be quite as bad as we fear and the good things we hope for will be more bountiful than we dreamed very in but only worldunderstand that the is full of positive and negative forces that nobody has as absolute power as some workingid and

with or supporting a nongovernmental effort has a responsibility to maximize the possibilities and minimize the perils. ideat all begins with the that what we have in common is more important than our interesting differences. 1998, on a bipartisan vote, we passed an amazing budget doubling thed budgets of the national institutes of health and had the last big chunk of money of the $3 billion of your tax money spent to sequence the human genome. the best money we ever spent.

of $800een in excess billion in economic activity generated from that. san diego, long known as the naval capital of the world is the human genome research capital of america. there are 700 computer companies alone that have been formed this just to do aspects of scientific research. york am a sloan-kettering and in texas and st. jude's children's hospital and los angeles, the pathbreaking allarch of the -- they are made possible because of the advances in the human genome. three talked to two or doctors who work in this field

in the last 10 days and i asked them the same questions and got a resounding yes to both when i believeyou actually that we might get to an 85% or higher survival rate for all forms of cancer within 10 years, all three said absolutely. learnedof what we have about how to get the human body to defend itself and how to attack tumors. all the years that i worked with bob dole, even when we were oneting, we only had unresolved disagreement and that was over health care and i could not blame him because he wanted to run for president. that was ok.

but no matter what else we were i kept my doord open, he kept his door open. we never lost our sense of humor, and we found a way to do what seems to be best for the american people. this mexican peso crisis was interesting. on the day that i had to help , bob dole and newt gingrich wanted to congress to vote to do it but there was an article in the morning paper that said by 81-11 the american people were against my helping mexico. keep in mind this was early 1995. we had not fully recovered from the economic difficulties of the late 1980's and 1990's. everybody had these preconceptions about mexico.

dole knew it was the right thing to do and when they pay the money back with almost $600 even his ownterest members had to say you were right and we were wrong. to bring it back, layingng happened to him in all those hospital beds, struggling to recover his movement. learning to have the discipline and gratitude because at least he had lived when so many others had died. him tode it possible for identify with other people so that no matter how hard you fought or you disagreed you did not want to dehumanize people to the point where when it came right down to it you could not join hands with them and do it had to be done to keep going forward.

of the testsssence we all face today. -- thek at the people faces of all those young people who committed murders in paris and you realize that they had been swayed in a very different believe they are at the beginning of their lives, there is somehow more glory in a premature death and -- that claimed the lives of innocent people than there was in getting up and going to work and trying to learn something useful and use it to change other people's lives. for the celebration of bipartisanship, we fed a lot of people on the mcgovern-dole food program along -- around the world.

all these poor kids since we started 15 years ago, a lot of them are grown now. their lives are different now. and they do not know who bob dole is and they do not know who bill clinton is. that they areow alive, they are healthy, to have an education. that a certain responsibility decided would be a good thing to work together. all those people whose hearts were pro--- broken on 9/11 who lost loved ones or had the gotibly disabled but who aid to begin again with their own lives and get college education because bob dole, bill clinton, two people that are probably largely irrelevant to the young people's lives hustled up a bunch of money from other

people and said why don't you give us something to send these kids to school, it makes a difference. and so let's come back to the genome. the genome will raise your chances of surviving any kind of willr and i hope one day provide a cure for als and a lot of other totally ability eating diseases. we are making real progress with parkinson's and alzheimer's. no matter what you think you citizen, thes a most important finding of the human genome has already been made. it is that every non--age-related difference you see in this audience, you think about this when you go out, every non-age-related difference

, body size and shape, skin color, eye color, hair or lack , is rooteden gender in one half of 1% of your genome. if you are a scientist, since you have 3.6 billion half a percent is a pretty good number. but still it means that we are 99 point 5% the same and yet this is not just politics. percent all spend 99.5 of our time thinking the half of the percent of us that is different? really, don't we? frenzyin this sports coming to an end of the football not know howdo

many times i am guilty, i will not point the finger, i have bypassedwn the street, a department store or window that has a reflection thinking if i had a body like lebron james i would have gone into a different line of work. have a we all done it? if i were a little taller or thinner or little better. it is an act of supreme that our to believe differences are more important than our common humanity. it is recipe for disaster in an interdependent world. to act it unleashes us on impulse and humanizing way to other people.

we live in a country where the constitution that puts limits on got an interesting argument once with another of my political adversaries who i liked very much personally, not bob dole. who i like also but this guy was not as accommodating. reason i got into this that he said he really believe we should all be treated the same, don't you? i said, i do. he said we believe there should be one rule for us and for you.

there are some things we will not do. i said absolutely. he says that puts you at a terrible disagreement. here is what i want to say to all of you. i do not care if you are republican, democrat, independent or whatever. we know the constitution mandate is cover my eyes and groups make better decisions than small homogenous elites. and we know that everywhere in the world where people are practicing inclusive politics and inclusive economics to get inclusive societies, good things are happening and everywhere in the world someone believes that they are in so much position of the truth they have the right to kill innocent and anonymous people at random or just spend their time fighting, good things are not happening. this is not rocket science.

and the findings of the human genome that are -- we are 99.5 the same confirm the teachings of all great faiths. the new testament, love your neighbor as yourself, the torah, a strangers aside may as well turn aside from the -- highh god the koran god. they can come to learn from one another. you are fully human until you can feel the arrow piercing another's skin as if it were entering your own. thatask you to think about . the great struggle in america to restore some sort of balance to our politics is a reflection of

that many ofieties our people feel because of the combination of economic disappointment and cultural conflict and change. this week to economists [indiscernible] because of increased alcohol consumption, prescription drug construction and other behaviors but they are dying from a broken heart. you do not ever want to get into a position where you do not have something to look forward to when you get up in the morning. bob dole inside

of some tragic fiction -- victim because he had something to look forward to when he got up in the morning. and that he saw it in other people's lives. it turned out there were some things he just would not do. the result -- as a result of which he got a lot done. debates.l these i like a good fight as well as the next person. but in the end the constitution was set up so that it might have been subtitled let's make a deal. go read it if you do not believe me. we voters, those of us who -- we have to remember that we sometimes feed this. we feed it if we want to be around people we agree with and we feed it if we do not vote in

elections just as well as if we do. nobody gets off scott free here. serviceou want public that addresses the great challenges of the age, the attempt to restore broad-based prosperity and a serious response to the security challenges we face that does not require us to abandon our basic values but does make us a safer country but still and inclusive one, we got to go back to that. two final things. politicalmportant book i have written in five years was not written by a politician or political scientist or even a historian biologists, e.o.

wilson. decadesarned us for that we are destroying species at the fastest rate in to that -- 10,000 years because of the way we developed. pagesook is less than 250 long. it is called the social conquest of earth. it, dr. wilson attempts and -- to describe all life on planet earth going back to the emergence of single celled organisms from the primordial slime. he says that any reasonable look includinghistory prehistory based on the evidence would lead you to the conclusion that of all the species had -- that have existed the foremost successful's are and, termites, bees, and people.

he is a guy who taught me 20 years ago that the combined way -- weight of all the ants on earth is greater than the weight of the combined people on earth. that is a lot of ants. there are species in africa that when being chased by predators a bunch of them will go on the tallest sprig of grass and sacrifice themselves so everyone else can get away. there are termites in south america in hot and wet climates that build underground housing with five holes, one to go in and out of and the other are for air-conditioning. i myself last summer when my daughter and i were on our foundation trip to africa went at one elephant preserve of our partners and with my own eyes i saw three different

anthills that were more than five feet high. one was six feet high and it was hotelaround a tree like a with its own shade tree. these are the things you do. wilson's point is there are ants, termites, bees, and people. the differences we have two things that termites and bees do not have. we have far greater potential for good because of our consciousness and our conscience. we have not just evolved our patterns of communication, we quickly andd grow feel. but, he said, because we have these, we are prone to arrogance and therefore we are dancing around the edges of our own destruction but every time we

come up to the brink we have done what was necessary to go forward. he is almost 90 now. he said i am betting that is what we are going to do again. i will say again the history of bipartisanship which the dole , whatute seeks to advance senator dole's career embodies an office and after he left, the stuff we have done together is of the triumph of cooperation over conflict. of diverse groups making better decisions than homogenous elites. an example of the kind of compromise that our founding

in tos sought to drill the fabric of american life. i want to read you something i wrote in my autobiography about bob dole. this is when we were running against each other for president in 1996. after a rocky start in fear worry, bob dole won all the primaries in march, wrapping up his party's nomination for the late -- in california. even though senator phil gramm who ran to the right of dole would have been easier to be, i was pulling for dole. no election is a sure thing. i believe the country would be in more solid and moderate hands with him. thought when we were in the middle of a campaign

fighting in debates, trying to beat each other's brains out. and that is a good thing. not a bad thing. that.eave you with next time you think there is no hope and there is no way for us to work out whatever the heck we are fighting about what we are arguing about here, remember the 99.5%. we need to develop one more time. remember all they did was uncover what the fate of been telling us all along. and remember you live in the most glorious time in history in and one its potential of the scariest in terms of its potential. we are condemned to share the future.

the only thing that is open for question is what the terms of the sharing will be. and that is for you to decide. thank you very much. [applause] [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2014] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. visit ncicap.org]

, it is a greatt honor to give you the dole leadership prize and thank you so much for coming to the campus of ku today. thank you so very much, sir. [applause]

>> on the next washington journal, peter ackerman chair of their group level the thing field on efforts to open presidential debates to third .arty candidates and tax advice plus your phone calls, tweets, and feasible comments -- facebook comments. >> sunday night on q&a, tyler abell, stepson of the late washington merry-go-round columnist drew pearson talks thet the second volume of

diaries that give an insider's take on washington, d.c. from 1960 to 1969. >> it was sister margot all the things that he did and sometimes he would criticize himself in the diary. if you read it carefully you must have from this, cross people when he says that column was too strong or should not set it that way or lyndon johnson will get mad at me for the way i wrote that column. but he needed to be told what i wrote and i am glad i wrote it. >> sunday night at 8 p.m. eastern on q&a. with congress on holiday recess the c-span networks feature a full line up of prime time programming. monday night at 8 p.m. eastern, lara logan, sebastian younger, and other journalist to have risked their lives coming -- covering events in the middle east. tuesday night at eight, celebrity activists speak out on a variety of issues.

wednesday night, events from the c-span archives featuring notable public figures who died in 2015. thursday at 8 p.m. eastern a look back at the year in congress and on new year's day, friday night at 8 p.m., law enforcement officials, activists, and journalist examine the prison system and its impact on minority communities. on c-span 2 monday night at 830 east during memoirs by reporters, activists and a former white house press secretary. tuesday night features books on economics and the economy. wednesday night, others talk about their books on science and technology. thursday discussions on isis and terrorism. and on years day friday night at eight, several of our in-depth programs from this year. on american history tv on c-span three, monday at 8 p.m. eastern the 70th anniversary of the liberation of auschwitz. tuesday night at eight, a

congressional ceremony on the 150th anniversary of the 13th amendment. wednesday night a debate on which president would be a better model for gop candidates today. calvin coolidge or ronald reagan. thursday at 8 p.m. eastern, wrote to the height -- white house rewind and on new year's a playwrightght and star of the broadway musical hamilton accepts that george washington book prize special achievement award. that is some of the programs featured in prime time on the c-span networks. now, part of an annual series of interviews hosted by the atlantic and the aspen institute. this part of the event includes former secretary of state: powell and commerce secretary penny pritzker. it is two hours. >> good morning, thank you for joining us. the census bureau which is part

of your dinner -- the main reported that the median income for mayor can households was lower in 2014 that he was in 2013. it was lower when george w. bush left office than when he arrived and now it appears president obama is at risk of duplicating that dubious achievement. median income is lower than it was 15 years ago which is something that has almost never been true in american history. andhave incomes stagnated is there a path that you can see forward toward consistently raising them again? >> let's step back for a minute. wage growth and productivity used to grow in parallel and then in 1973 that stopped being the case and if you step back and say why is that, it is this reduction in investment in what can keep- things that america competitive and keep our workforce competitive.

when we step back and think about what we going to do about that and what is the path, we have to think about how do we invest in worker productivity so that our workers are globally competitive because what happened in 1960 -- 73 was there was the beginning of globalization, the beginning of when technology advances started to really impact productivity and so we have to continue so investing which is something that is not the way we think about our budget. we think about our budget as expenditures but we have to invest, we have to invest in our infrastructure, invest in trade agreements, we have to invest in innovation, and entrepreneurship and i could go into detail. thatu point out productivity has continued to grow even though wages have not. are we talking about economics,

technology, globalization, or problem of politics, the way the games and the -- gains in the economy are distributed? >> i think it is all of the above. what we have to do is use politics to prioritize and the prioritization, if you look at r&d, real investment has been flat since 1980. that is not going to help us when the rest of the world and other large economies are spending more and more money. that puts us at a less competitive situation. the path forward to me involves education, basic what are we teaching kids in school, how are we teaching and how much -- why is an activity so important. the president program for kids in school with a can have access to broadband. it is so we can stay ahead. we have to invest in immigration. we have a shortage of