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I have 15 years of executive experience as a big-city mayor and as a governor.

My dad was a city councilman and a county commissioner, so I grew up involved and engaged in the political process.

I want to be a mayor who helped, really helped.

I can't imagine being mayor and not having had the experience working for President Clinton or President Obama, or, for that matter, working in Congress. On the other hand, I think I would have been a better adviser had I been mayor first. If I had had this job first, I could have seen the implications of things I was doing.

I was involved as deputy mayor in New York City on 9/11.

I was an organizer in the Food, Agricultural and Tobacco Workers Union down in North Carolina.

I've been mayor for five years. I've led a city. And directed a police department. I know how to use resources.

On the political side, I was the Democratic nominee for the Governor of Tennessee in 1970 and 1998.

I worked in the Senate in the 1970s. I worked for the Labor, Public Welfare Committee, and we had Ted Kennedy and my old boss, Bill Hathaway, and Walter Mondale.