tavis: good evening, i am tavis smiley. president obama's date of the union address is tuesday. his improving poll numbers will soon be tested as the host of the republicans will announce their bids for the white house. tonight is a preview of the speech and a look at the state of american politics with former u.s. senator, bill bradley and presidential historian douglas brinkley. bradley mounted his own campaign for the white house in 2000 and was an early obama supporter in 2008. douglas brinkley has the latest installment on the american series of "the quiet world.' we are glad you can join us. our state of the union preview and our interview with douglas

brinkley coming up. >> all i know is his name is james, and he needs extra help>> i am james. >> yes. >> to everyone making a difference, you help us all live better. >> nationwide insurance proudly supports tavis smiley. tavis and nationwide insurance, working to improve financial literacy and the economic empowerment that comes with it. >> ♪ nationwide is on your side ♪ >> and by contributions to your pbs station from viewers like you. thank you. [captioning made possible by kcet public television] captioned by the national captioning institute --www.ncicap.org-- tavis: bill bradley search for 20 years in the u.s. nate from new jersey following his

basketball career with the new york yet -- new york knicks. his books include "the new american story." always an honor to have you on this program. let me start by asking what you think the challenge is. what is the mandate for the president tomorrow night in this speech that so many are suggesting will impact his reelection chances? i am not sure it is that serious, but what the makeup the speech tomorrow -- what do you make of the speech tomorrow? >> the house to give people an idea of what he wants to do for the next two years -- he has to give people an idea of what he wants to do. tavis: you were talking about civility years ago. i can think of many conversations i had with you and white skin privilege and the challenge of america. i thought about you today wendy

civility conversation started to get some lift off. what do you make of what it took to get us in this conversation about civility in america? >> the political process has degenerated into name-calling and extremism. i think that is unfortunate. i think the president did an incredible job at the funeral the other day in arizona to call people to their better selves and higher ground. he might very well have had an impact on the political process. i hope that will be the way the debate will be held over the next six months. tavis: cannot be sustained now that we are into policy? -- can that be sustained? by joe? the president called for stability because congress was out of session. is bipartisan sitting together

is that much to do about nothing? >> i think it is a symbol of the desire of people to work together. it is a symbol of that desire in part because they feel the american people want that to happen. so i think that is one of the requirements. i remember when i was in the senate for eight years it was a republican president and a republican senate, yet we got a lot of things done. i think that is the way it is now. the question is, what can you do to come together? you have to have compromise on both sides. the question for me is will republicans really compromise on the issues important to the country? whether it is pension or job creation, energy or the issues that we all know we have to address if we will compete effectively? tavis: what reason is there for republicans to compromise and

help the president put points up on the board? why help out? >> i think ultimately people will be judged now that they control one house of having some responsibility. they had the opportunity in the first two years of saying no to everything. now they don't have that opportunity because they have responsibility. when the president lays out his agenda which i expect to be about competitiveness and how we deal with china and india, and what we have to do internally to compete effectively, he is going to ask republicans to be a part of that. they could very well respond to that, because everybody in america knows if we don't have a better education system, if we don't reduce the deficit, if we don't stimulate job creation, that the others in the world that are advancing fast will catch up and pass us.

tavis: you call for republicans to compromise. the flip side is the president might compromising. what is the difference between a democratic president given to his base was and is compromising and his capitulating? >> the question is do you move our collective and minute -- collective humanity a half inch forward? do you move job creation a point forward? if you make progress in the right direction that is worthy of praise. tavis: to your point about the footsteps in the dark we are hearing from china and india, given that hu jintao just left the country what what the president be saying about the level of competition with china? >> he ought to be saying the level of competition from china is serious. we have to have schools that will educate our kids better

than they are doing now. we have to live within our means. we have to stimulate job creation. i don't think he will say this tomorrow night, but i don't think the tax agreement will do the job. the job is to get unemployment to 7% by the summer of 2012. he needs that for his reelection. come summer, there will be a reevaluation whether the social security tax cut will have achieved that purpose. what i would like to see him do in the next six months is proposed wage subsidies. any country that hires an additional worker and does not lay anyone off, the federal government ought to pay 20% of those costs. that will get us down to 7% unemployment level. tavis: give me a second to set this up. i want to ask you a hard core political question. you mentioned you disagreed with

the president compromising on those bush tax cuts. i happen to agree with you in that regard. it was rahm emanuel who urged this president to do a number of things just to get points on the board because he would need that for his reelection. there is no reason to believe bill daley will do the same thing. he may very well do the same thing can encourage the president to do x, y, or z for the sake of getting reelected. how do you juxtapose that with your principles and doing what people who voted for you expected you to do? >> i think the president maximizes his chances of getting reelected if he can guarantee the unemployment rate at 7%. in december, the tax agreement might not have been the best thing in the long run. it was certainly taking things

off the table they cannot talk about. if what they agreed to produce 7% unemployment rate, then he can come back with more and use it in an election. if they failed to do that then he can blame them because they got part of the responsibility. this is the politics of real things. there are 9.5% of the american public, 17% of those who have been looking -- who are unemployed. we have to create more jobs and can't do that in a number of ways. we have to get the corporations that have $2 trillion in the banks to spend that to hire people. we can help do that if we have the federal government help subsidize a% of the wage of every new job that a corporation puts on its books. tavis: but we failed those banks

out without strings attached. now the president called them begging them to invest some of that money into the economy. what suggests there is any way employment -- unemployment will get anywhere near 7%? >> he still has policy tools like the one with the wage subsidy that could make that happen. it will be a tall order, but he could do that. if the companies feel enough confidence and certainty of what the terrain will be, and that is one of the values of the tax agreement is, that they could use some of that money to hire people back. i think you will find a lot of companies who have dropped their productivity because they cut their work force so much. if they hire more people they will make more money and more people will be employed. tavis: one thing the polls

indicate is that americans have had some issue with president obama on the jobs front, they have never turned against him personally. because of that, you see his poll numbers ancient up. what say you about his chances to get his agenda through given that most americans seem to be rooting through him personally? >> i think his popularity is still strong with the broad mass of american people. the american people know he was dealt a hand that he had to deal with. we were in the worst economic circumstance since the great depression, we were in two wars. he had to set that straight. i think the untold story of the stimulus package was not the millions of jobs that were avoided being lost, but also the fact that it is the largest education bill in history. and it is the largest infrastructure bill in history. the key thing now is to invest

sensibly. if we are going to invest in infrastructure, infrastructure that makes us more competitive in the world. we are going to invest in education, let's make sure we hold our teachers and schools accountable for results. and we then get better educated people to deal with the challenges of the 21st century. tavis: you served as part of a divided government but you also admitted that our politics and discourse is much worse than it was then. juxtaposed to me how it is you remain hopeful that we can do better under this divided government when our discourse is worse? >> i think the president has shown he has a lot of moves. any president has moves he can make that can change the whole debate. i think continuing to take the high ground and hammer back on

substance and lead by the power of the presidency. beat the president of the united states, not a politician. thereby call all americans to a higher ground. tavis: what about [unintelligible] >> i thought you were going to ask me a question i could answer. there will be held. just because you are in l.a. you feel like you are the champion. tavis: i love him, he is a great player. >> i do, too. tavis: we will close on that. bill bradley, former u.s. senator. always honored to have you on this program. thank you for your time. >> good to be with you. tavis: up next, douglas brinkley. stay with us. douglas brinkley is an award winning historian and best- selling author whose books

include "the quiet world." he joins us tonight from new york. always good to have you on the program. >> thank you. tavis: given that i just got done talking with senator bradley about this speech tomorrow night, i don't want to the first question to much but what do you make of the president's mission tomorrow night? >> he will continue talking about the new civility we need in this country. it is a post-tucson state of the union address. the visual of republicans and democrats sitting by each other and talking about the need to tackle things like getting the deficit under control, finding new jobs. it will be one message that the president is taking the high

road saying let's keep the noise down on the right and left and let's get some things done. tavis: you edited the reagan diaries. we know when the president went on vacation during the christmas holiday he was reading some reagan material. what is your sense about what the president is, should be taken from ronald reagan? particularly when going through the recession and the divided government is concerned? >> president obama had a few historians at the white house for a couple of dinners. i was lucky enough to be one of those asked. he was very interested in ronald reagan. part of it is what you just said, he thought reagan had a hard time in 1982 but came back. there are other parts that are similar. they both have the illinois background, the same state,

although reagan is the only president born in illinois. and demeanor-wise, reagan was a conservative but a pragmatic conservative. he found a silver linings in things. he did not like to have enemies around him. he was a conciliatory person with his persona. i think president obama recognized that he likes that side of ronald reagan. he called them -- called him the transformative president of his lifetime. i think reagan is a center-right politician and obama center- left, but sometimes you have to reach over and make things happen. reagan is celebrated on his 100th birthday for turning his back on the hard right and doing arms control with the soviet union even though conservatives thought it was bad. many on the left are angry at obama, but history might prove obama right-reacting so strong

to the center. tavis: to your point about reagan being to the right and progressives are upset with the president for a number of issues. what evidence is there -- why should we believe that this president is not going to end up compromising and capitulating on things that those on the left who supported him don't want him or expect him to do? >> my answer is not going to be that inspiring to you but i don't know what the -- if the left has any were else to go. the fact of the matter is whoever runs the republican party against obama is not going to be possible to the progressives. there is not a legitimate third- party movement so you have to take a leap of faith that a second obama administration would get dividends. bill clinton had to triangulate back in the 1990's, but second

term clinton got good for our emotions when writing about environmentalism. clinton did not give the left much in the secondary -- in the second term. i think the left will have to hope that today's center obama on a second term will deliver some more goods to them. and they have the health care. he has to defend health care right now. that will bring the progressives behind the president. tavis: one last question, i want to get to "the quiet world," but what reason is there for republicans to work with him? they don't want to see him reelected so now they have power in washington. what reason is them to work with him? why not continue this obstructive path that got you control of the house? >> because you had obama get

some successes with some bipartisan efforts, start agreement being one, but you have people like me summer caskey who you don't know which way she will swing in the senate. -- you have the summer caske -- lisa murkowski. it was the american people saying we are tired of politicians name-calling and screaming at each other. get something done. if you want to run for president as a republican you will have to find a genial ronald reagan- style. nick rumley has it but that shrill -- mitt romney has it but that shrill hard right style will not fly. tavis: to your tech "the quiet world," it does seem when you

hear alaska you think of sarah palin thanks to the media giving her so much attention these days. what does that do for an author putting out the first book about alaska? >> sarah palin's name is not in the index. she has not been that important to alaska's history. i am beginning my book with the glaciers of 1879 when ecotourism started providing an alternative to saving the beauty of alaska's, protection of polar bears and the caribou herds. that started coming about against the extremes of the gold rush and copper russia's. now there was a timber and now it is oil. it has always been a group of artists and eccentrics, sometimes the federal government who said we want to

save these special scenic places as heirlooms for our grandchildren. this is the story of this eclectic group i tell of the photographer and walt disney who started doing documentaries on wildlife in alaska's, joining forces with dwight eisenhower. sarah palin has famously said, "drill, baby, drill," it was dwight eisenhower who wanted to save the wildlife refuge. there is a real story about these wilderness detection pioneers environmentalists that i tell about in this book. it has unlikely heroes ranging from eisenhower to walt disney. tavis: juxtapose what you started to do a moment ago, the way we are treating the environment -- not just the environment but the way we pushed to the background

environmental issues in the debate versus what you found and laid out for us in this trilogy. >> when you look at eisenhower 50 years ago he stopped the development and sign a treaty on antarctica. that is why we are not having oil refineries down there. it was an almost wholly praise. eisenhower's save the arctic refuge 50 years ago. it is important we keep these special places that defines the united states. imagine our country without its monuments and national parks. imagine if you did not have the great highway one up to the redwood country. this landscape of america is what defines us because economies come and go. politicians wanted tomine the grand canyon and theodore roosevelt said know. they wanted to build a railroad through yellowstone and we said

no. unfortunately in alaska the oil industry is hovering around the arctic because there is oil down there and want to get it out of the wildlife refuge. the american people have to say no at a time when glaciers are melting and there is a wildlife protection movement. it is not a french left movement, it has been conservatives and liberals. it is people that care about nature and want to protect the great history of alaska and our rainforest. i try to tell that story of our wealth heritage. while it is important we don't deal with the recession right now and start moving public lands for quick profits for one generation. tavis: what it is about the wilderness that leads some of us to think it is there to be conquered? that it is something to be overcome as opposed to embraced

or appreciated in the way you have laid out? >> because the mainstream -- i am not talking about the u.s., pollution makes ours looked like nothing. it is this notion that we should cover the bonus -- , for the wilderness when we settled our country. the dark forest was considered something we need plow. we have a new understanding of the need for interconnectedness and why all species matter. your roosevelt -- theodore roosevelt understood that. we cannot just dump chemicals and not have a conservation ethic in the u.s. we have to make a land -- the one thing that defines us as human beings -- are we giving

the land to our children better than we found it? we don't have anything to caulker. we have a lot to say. tavis: the new boat from douglas brinkley is called "the quiet world." good to have you on the program. look forward to having you back soon. >> thank you. tavis: that is our show for tonight. see you back here next time on pbs. thanks for watching. as always, keep the faith. >> for more information on today's show, visit tavis smiley at pbs.org tavis: join me next time peter bergen with and kim edwards. that is next time. we will see you then. >> all i know is his name is james, and he needs extra help with his reading. >> i am james. >> yes.

>> to everyone making a difference, you help us all live better. >> nationwide insurance proudly supports tavis smiley. tavis and nationwide insurance, working to improve financial literacy and the economic empowerment that comes with it. >> ♪ nationwide is on your side ♪ >> and by contributions to your pbs station from viewers like you. thank you. [captioning made possible by kcet public television] captioned by the national captioning institute --www.ncicap.org--