LEWISBURG — The 2008 presidential race is wide open, veteran NBC newsman and best-selling author Tim Russert said Tuesday night in kicking off the Bucknell Forum’s national speakers series.

But Mr. Russert, speaking at a packed Weis Center for the Performing Arts on the Bucknell University campus, said the political situation in Washington is “poisonous” and that the next president must bring the country together on significant issues as diverse as the war in Iraq, health care and Social Security.

“We are capable of doing this if we are willing to accept a simple notion, that one party and one ideology does not have a monopoly on the truth,” the moderator of NBC’s “Meet the Press” said. “If you look at World War II, if you look at the national highway system, if you look at our higher education system, if you look at all the things we’ve done as a nation which have made the quality of our life in this country second to none, it has been done with bipartisanship.

“Sometimes one party is leading the effort more than another, but in the end people come together and find a consensus and say this is the right thing to do.”

That is what is so lacking in Washington, he said.

“The situation there is now poisonous,” Mr. Russert said. “People don’t want to talk to each other. They want to fight. They want to arm for the next election.”

He said with 390 of the 435 seats in the U.S. House deemed “safe seats … There is no incentive to reach across the aisle and try to achieve common good.”

The media, he said, plays a crucial role in this process.

“We can put people on from the far right and far left and let them go at it like caged animals. Or, we can try to find people who are also trying to find solutions and answers who have legitimate and serious differences,” he said.

The difficult job in 2007 and 2008, Mr. Russert said, is that “We have to find out from these candidates what they really intend for us.”

The campaign for president is “wide open. But what we have is a situation where the candidates are very comfortable with their Web sites and they’re very comfortable with their advertising,” he said.

“They want to package everything in a way that sounds very appealing. … Nowhere in those ads or on the Web sites do you see how we’re going to pay for it.

“Our job in the media, your job as citizens — and that is what this forum is all about — is to try to elicit from these candidates their thought processes, their intellectual journeys,” he said. “This election is far from over. Remember a year ago, everyone said it’s Hillary Clinton versus John McCain. Well, that’s not what people are saying today. Things change, things happen. And you will have a chance to participate.”

Two additional Bucknell Forum events are planned. On Oct. 18, a panel of national political correspondents will meet, and on Nov. 5, Dr. Benjamin Barber will give a talk titled, “The News as Commodity in an Interdependent World: Can Citizenship Survive?”

Visit www.bucknell.edu/theforum for more information about the programs.