Would I be the 3rd term of Rudy Giuliani or the 4th term of Mike Bloomberg? It'll be neither. It'll be the first term of Joe Lhota. We're all different.
What was unique about me being in City Hall during the Giuliani Administration, I was the only one who wasn't an attorney. I may have been the only one who didn't work in a prosecutor's office. So I took a completely different point of view on how the city should be run. Very close to a business, very close on metrics and numbers.
The mayor of New York is the chief executive of the city. It is a complex organization, and it requires the requisite skills to understand how to be the leader of the people and manage the government of N.Y.
Mayors of New York have been elected not because of their party label, but because of their philosophy and their approach overall, and that has been since time immemorial in New York, that people are not party-oriented in New York.
It's been 35 years since I left school. Almost nine of them were in government; all the rest were in the private sector. And I've proven over time to be a great leader.
I would leave school every day and walk to my grandparents' house under the El because everyone worked. I was 6 and walking home alone from school. It was a different city and a different time.
I have Czech, I have Russian, I have English, I have Italian. Uh, what am I missing? A little bit of Irish. The Russian is Jewish. So I'm your classic American mutt.
I still am a virulent anti-communist. It is a bad system, an immoral system, and one that takes away the rights of people and the rights of individuals. And everywhere it's gone, it's failed.
