I wasn't predicted to be anything. I just followed an inner spirit, and it put me in the right place and the right time. I didn't want to be the mayor of Atlanta. I didn't want to run for Congress. I didn't want to work for Martin Luther King Jr. I wanted to work close to him and be a writer and write about the movement.
As mayor, I'm in the frying pan. I'm just sitting here on the griddle now, and I've got to really think, you know, do I want to stay here on the griddle?
I may not be the world's best glad-handing politician, but I've been elected mayor twice. I understand politics. And I definitely understand where the state line is.
I was the first mayor to even go meet with the LGBT community.
Listen, if the mayor wants to have a debate about education in this city, I got three words: bring it on.
For the fifth year in a row, the Bush budget cuts city core services to pay for wealthy tax breaks. And once again, the mayor's requests were not funded.
Actually, as president of the Conference of Mayors, we passed the Simpson-Bowles plan as a template, as a template, as a frame work for moving forward and the president has done the same.
When I ran the first time in 2001, they called me 'The Latino Mayor.' By the time I left in 2013, with a 58 percent approval rating, half the people liked me, half the people didn't. I was everybody's mayor. There was never any criticism that I was just for one group.
I want to be known as the mayor who happens to be Latino who made a difference. I ran to make a difference.
I've said for a long time that the governor and the mayors should be far more engaged in this conversation at the federal level. I mean, the consequences and the impact of the federal government's broken immigration policy do not land on the backs of the people in Washington. They just don't.
