The following is a special presentation of WTCI, Chattanooga, North Georgia, and the entire Tennessee Valley.

I stand here today humbled by the task before us.

Just what does Newsweek's editor Jon Meacham, have to say about the nation's newly elected president?

Plus, is there another book around the corner?

And what is a dinner conversation like at the Meacham home?

Find out the answers to these and more coming up on the A List.

This is one of my favorite questions.

People often say.

Now I am a news magazine journalist, and so therefore, I practice psychiatry without a license and.

Last week we introduced you to Jon Meacham, managing editor of Newsweek and an acclaimed author.

Today, we begin part two of our interview with the site of this multi-talented man that few people get to see.

Jon Meacham.

Father, figure it all right.

He's an ancestor.

Now, you have young kids.

I do.

How old are they now?

Six, four and eight months.

What?

What do they know about politics?

What do you talk about at the dinner table?

I try to talk about politics.

My son in an early Freudian move, has declared that he dislikes presidents.

So that's entirely, entirely hostile.

My daughter, who's four, who?

If you could get arrested for smoking in daycare, she would do it.

She's a very difficult.

She actually we had there was one story.

We were watching the debate in New Hampshire between the Iowa caucus and New Hampshire this year.

And I was watching it.

They were coloring.

And that one point my daughter, who was in three, said, what is this on television?

And I said, well, these are the people who want to be president.

And she said, Senator Clinton was on the thing.

And she said, well, girls can't be president.

And I thought, oh, Jesus, you know what?

What have I done?

What have I told her?

You know, I've been treated some terrible gender sin, you know?

And so I followed up a little bit and it turned out what she meant was girls hadn't been president because of the placemats, you know, and all the presidents and the images she had seen.

And it shouldn't have taken that to.

It seems hemolytic, but it has the virtue of being true.

For me to realize that the significance of the symbolism of both Clinton and Obama.

But it did.

And it brought it home in a different way.

What kind of world do you hope they'll live in in the next decade or two.

Over safe from those who wish us harm?

We live in New York, and so that's a very vivid concern.

You know, you want to you want a country that continues to fulfill the Jeffersonian promise that we're all created equal.

This all sounds very grand, but you want liberty under law.

You want them to feel safe and you want them to be kind.

You want a kind of a kind of charity and a kind of grace that have been at our best, strong American characteristics.

And that Lord knows we've fallen short.

But ultimately, we've we've always made things a little better.

And so I hope we can do that for them and then they can do it in turn and and so forth.

Yeah.

As we turn to a more serious subject.

I learned about his reflective process.

He spoke about the role of the presidency past, present and future.

That's what you said.

Some people say that we didn't just elect a president.

We hired a savior.

What do you think about that?

We hear for we've heard for the past year, yes, we can.

But can he?

Well, there is the fear.

I think in some quarters that if his supporters discover that if he tried to walk across the Potomac to Arlington and he sang, they would be stunned and befuddled by this and that sending death might still be with us by the State of the Union.

There is some, I think, expectation management that needs to it needs to go on.

But Obama, to his everlasting credit, is doing that.

He said in Grant Park on election night, the road will be long, the climb will be steep.

And I think he's just very, very astute.

And I haven't drank the Kool-Aid.

And I don't think that I don't think he's the Messiah.

So we don't know.

We don't know.

You don't know.

Let's talk a little bit about the future and about the legacy that Obama is going to leave.

And we look at we look at Jackson and we look at Obama, maybe again, a president who came from semi ordinary means to do extraordinary things.

Is he going to be able to map out his legacy?

Do we have control over the legacy we leave some of?

I mean, it's so early.

The one thing about Obama that I think suggests he's not going to go to any extreme in either extreme is he thinks of himself in part as a writer, and he's a storyteller.

And I don't mean that in a he makes things up, but he he weaves narratives.

And again, he wrote two memoirs by the time he was 44 years old, vaguely Proustian in his in his output.

There.

I think that he wants the story to end well.

And I think he knows a lot of history and he understands, I think, the nuances of politics in a way that is not always completely evident, but particularly if you read the books you see that he gets.

I commend his treatment of Ronald Reagan in the second book, The Audacity of Hope.

It's a very sophisticated understanding of Reagan's strengths and weaknesses.

And, you know, this is just something he came to because he was reading about it and lived through it.

You know, in four or eight years, we'll you know, we'll still be debating, you know, what he's done and what he's doing.

And as President Bush pointed out recently, there have been eight new books on George Washington's legacy in the past few years.

So we'll be fighting this out for a long time.

You mentioned George Bush.

Where's he been?

I mean, ironically, I was in I was in Israel on a trip a few weeks ago, and he was on the cover of one of the newspapers with Tzipi Livni, who's had the Kadima Party.

And I was a little taken aback because I don't think I've seen him on the cover of any periodical in the States for quite a while.

Is that self-imposed or, you know, where has he been?

Well.

They've been house hunting in Dallas, I think.

I just read that I.

Well, let's remember, there's nine out of ten Americans think that we're on the wrong track.

He has an approval rating about 20%.

It's a about where Truman left Washington and about where Nixon left.

It's just been a really miserable year and a half or so.

And I think there are a lot of folks who believe that the last eight years feel like maybe 12 or 16.

I mean, George Bush's presidency began with an election day that lasted eight weeks.

And that was a bit that was a sign of something.

There was the horror of the attacks, the ongoing and frustrating war in Afghanistan, the road to war in Iraq, which I have a slightly different view than the popular one on, and then the conduct of the war and now the economy.

People are just ready to turn the page.

And I think that President Bush will be a subject of historical debate as long as as Churchill once said, the English language is spoken in any corner of the globe.

It's been a very consequential presidency.

It's been difficult.

I don't think anybody would begin to argue with with that.

Was he, as people have posited, the worst president ever?

I think it's so, so too early to talk in those terms.

What is clear is that the political coalition that Ronald Reagan built in 1980 has fallen apart.

If I were a Republican right now, I would be very interested in what the future is going to hold.

The idea that you have foreign policy hawks, fiscal conservatives and religious conservatives all under one tent seems very.

I just don't think that is sustainable.

I think you saw that with McCain's defeat.

President Bush is in some ways a tragic figure because he he was dealt a hand by history, that he played well for a brief time.

And then it got incredibly complicated.

And I think people can.

I think the argument that somehow or another, the road to war was entirely intentional or that the intelligence that he ponied up the intelligence.

And I think all of that kind of talk is is misplaced.

I think that people of goodwill can disagree about the intelligence that took us into Iraq.

What's seems inarguable to me is starting about the summer of 2003, when we realized that we were not being greeted as liberators, that required a course correction.

That just didn't happen.

And I think the conduct of the war, as opposed to the road to it, is what will always be the most troubling part of the Bush legacy.

American To promote his new book, American Lion, Meacham took to the airwaves on a nationwide media blitz, appearing on shows ranging from The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and The Colbert Report all the way to The O'Reilly Factor and Charlie Rose.

And speaking of media frenzies, I asked his thoughts about a certain governor from Alaska.

What kind of future do you think Sarah Palin is politically?

I don't know.

And I think it's one of the fascinating questions of modern politics right now.

I don't have any idea.

I'm trying to form what I call pundits anonymous to try to keep us from from from predicting.

And we fall off the wagon.

We have to go to meetings.

It's not.

The first step is admitting.

That.

That's right.

You had to have a problem.

I don't know.

I she she's clearly a very talented political performer.

I did not think her argument the argument I should say that her being one of the people was therefore a qualification for high office was very convincing.

I think there's a difference.

We've confused and conflated two words in politics at the moment.

One is elite and the other is excellence.

What people attack elites and say, Oh, you know, elites don't like outsiders.

That's not right.

It's I think we have to insist on some level of excellence and experience.

Now, Obama did not have an enormous amount of experience, but I don't think there's any sense a person in the United States who would argue that he did not demonstrate a certain level of excellence and in getting where he got at that age.

So be watching Governor Palin very, very closely.

She's obviously not going to the Senate.

That was one thought so.

And she did a good job then Georgia for Chambliss.

So we'll see.

She will not go gentle into that good night.

Do you think the media was too hard on her?

No, no, I think that I think there were some early questions in the first couple of days that were out of bounds about her family and that's to be regretted.

And I think we should learn from that.

One of the things we have to do in our business is try to take a deep breath before we go off on on tangents.

Someone describes the just gotten me recently the media as the national media as like a kids soccer game where everybody just chases the ball.

No, no, no one stays in position.

They just go.

That tends to happen.

And we need to do better by staying in position.

And but in terms of her knowledge, in terms of what Katie Couric got out of her in the interviews, which I think were quite important, I you know, I don't think we were overly harsh.

It was he was a P.O.W.

when he was 13 years old.

Jon Meacham has this incredible ability to bounce between the decades without missing a beat.

And he processes actions and initiatives of American politics.

But I can't help but wonder about his perspective on the media's role as a new chapter is written in this country's history.

For 60 years later.

What about the media influence on the election?

I mean, it's just astounding to me the amount of coverage and also the intimacy of the coverage and how far you're able to really pry into the personal lives of these people.

And where do you draw the line?

Do Just to just to just to connect these is a little bit in terms of prying into someone's personal life.

Andrew Jackson's wife was referred to as a bigamist and a whore by his opponents.

Thomas Jefferson's relationship with Sally Hemings was aired in real time.

This has been it's been ever thus.

And I'd argue it simply goes with the territory and some also depends a little bit on what you mean by the press or the media.

I mean, does that include news?

Do you think we provide too much?

No.

Well, I think Newsweek praised enough, But I think, you know, you get on some of the Internet sites.

Drudge and Huffington Post and things like that.

Not to just name those, but there's a lot that that go a step further, of course, than what Newsweek is going to.

Sure.

But that's what that's where you have to make the distinctions.

If one means the media by anything that's in the medium, then that's one thing.

And sure, there's lots of stuff that shouldn't be said in terms of institutions like ours who attempt to exercise a certain level of judgment.

We don't always get it right.

God knows.

Phil Gramm, the founder of the modern Newsweek, once said that Newsweek was supposed to be the first rough draft of history.

And Mrs. Graham Katharine Graham, who ran us for many, many years, when we get something wrong, used to say, does it have to be quite so rough?

But we're always learning and we have to admit our mistakes and be humble about it.

Too much is given, much is expected, and we're not going to get it right all the time of interesting facts.

But the kind of tonality you're talking about, I don't know.

I mean, it's a constant battle to do the right and responsible thing while doing your job.

And, you know.

Have you ever regretted something that you've run in Newsweek?

Sure.

Give us an example.

No, thanks.

Yeah.

But yes, of course.

And regretted not running something, never held back.

This is one of my favorite questions people often say.

You know, the problem is the media is used to be that you all wouldn't run things that you didn't think were exactly right.

And I would say, how do you know we still don't do that if we didn't run it?

How do you know?

So beyond the headlines of magazines and books, Meacham's informed opinions seem very matter of fact.

Let's turn the page and talk about policy, economic and foreign.

It's on the level of 1932 and 1980, and I saw somebody on television this morning saying this was the worst crisis since the Civil War.

I don't think that's true, but there are enormous challenges.

Part of the point of to circle back a bit to do history as well is they've always been we're always at a fork in the road and we're always trying to take the fork, as is Yogi Berra would say.

So things are always tough.

This is particularly so because of the we have two wars.

We have live enemies who who wish us harm.

We have a lot of people's livelihoods and destinies in danger here.

So it's an incredibly difficult time, but we've overcome difficult times before, and so that should give us some hope.

What do you think the next steps should be in Iraq?

I don't know.

I.

The surge has worked very fairly well, according to the prescribed limits of that.

One hopes that civil societies is recovering somewhat at a pace that's been very hard.

As you know, it's not a country.

That's one thing which we sort of forget sometimes.

I mean, it's three countries put together and, you know, Senator Biden long ago suggested breaking it up, actually just returning it to to its pre British state.

So this was never going to be easy.

And I don't I wish Senator Obama well.

I think Secretary Gates has done a terrific job and comes from that tradition of George Herbert Walker Bush of pragmatism that I think we could have used a lot more of the last eight years.

I'm going to take a detour.

I want to talk about on faith your online kind of dialog that you have.

You also with American Gospel.

Broached the subject about church and state and the influence of religion in our government.

Is there a separation of church and state?

Should there be?

Yes and yes.

Okay.

Nobody will ever.

Know the next question.

Absolutely.

You have to separate church and state.

My argument is you can't separate religion and politics.

That religion politics are both about people.

They're about what people value, what they want, how they want to do it, how they want to be.

You might as well try to separate economics and politics as religion and politics.

The great insight of the founding, particularly by James Madison, was that religion had to be one factor among many in the Republican construct.

And if you tried to banish it, you saw how well that worked in France.

If you tried to push religion to the side, then you simply aggravate and exacerbate you aggravate the religious and exacerbate the tensions.

And so by treating it as one factor among many, you make it to some extent, and I would say controllable.

Exactly.

But it becomes something that can be dealt with in the ordinary course of politics.

Church and state are two different things.

Churches is different than religion in politics.

Church and state are two institutions that need to be separated.

I'm a religious person, not a very good one.

But Robert Louis Stevenson, I think, once said it's the duty of the Christian not to succeed, but to fail cheerfully.

And I fail cheerfully all the time.

But you sit on two stories.

That's impressive.

I do.

I do.

That's for my sins.

That's a whole that's interactive trollop.

That's a whole different thing.

The church and state, I think, have to be separated both for the good of the state and for the good of the church.

The interesting intellectual tradition behind separation is is particularly at Baptist one, is that you have to, in Roger Williams phrase, keep the Garden of Christ Church safe from the wilderness of the world.

That empire and politics have always ended up corrupting the church because inevitably politicians, emperors want to use whatever they can to secure whatever ends are at hand.

And if religion is one of those things at hand, then they use it.

And that ends up corrupting what one hopes religion is supposed to do.

That my my son goes to public school and we were talking about how there's no prayer in school and why that is.

And he said, But we do pray every morning, to which I was a little shocked.

And he cited the Pledge of Allegiance, One nation under God.

There you go.

That's you know, Rousseau had a phrase about about public civil religion, which goes back to Plato was Plato, Rousseau, Machiavelli, Plato, Machiavelli, Rousseau.

Mixing up the chronology there in which civil religion is the idea that the state should be worshiped.

That's a very dangerous thing.

What I find more interesting is an idea of Benjamin Franklin's about public religion, which is that in the public sphere, a kind of deference to some transcendent power is is wise and beneficial, and you try to leave the details out of it.

American democracy.

Clearly.

Jon Meacham is a renowned historian and one of the most knowledgeable men of our time.

But I asked him to look forward instead of back and to give us just a small glimpse of what he sees for his own future.

Where do you see yourself in the next ten years?

Probably institutional.

I don't know.

I love what I do.

I'm very lucky.

I'm very, very fortunate to work with the people I work with and do the things I do.

And so I'm just going to keep plugging.

Do you think you'll ever write another book?

I probably will.

Or two.

Or three.

I probably will.

I'm thinking about different things, so we'll we'll figure it out.

What about on Obama?

I think Obama.

I think there'll be plenty of that for a long time to come.

One of the things about books, it seems to me, is it's hard to find them where they ain't.

You know, what are people not not paying attention to?

And look, Jackson, it was interesting as ubiquitous as he seems, he's actually quite obscure.

And so one hopes you can help resurrect people who are interesting and who merit some attention and who are fun.

Absolutely.

And we've talked about the legacy that Jackson and others have left.

What legacy do you want to leave?

Oh, Lord.

That's a very grand question for this hour.

I'm just trying to do my job, trying to continue, trying to do like make things a little better than they were and and try to I do believe, as I said before, I do believe in the injunction that too much is given, much is expected.

And I've been very, very fortunate and given a great deal.

And so I'm just going to just I just keep after it.

Well, good.

And we're glad that you gave us your time today.

Thanks.

We appreciate your joining us.

Thank you.

Thanks, John.

Thanks.

Be sure to tune in next week when I get up close and personal with Doris Kearns Goodwin.

And you may be surprised what she has to say.

That's Thursday night at 830, only on WTCI, your local PBS station.