continued the conversation on our facebook and twitter pages. >> tonight, prime minister's questions with prime minister david cameron. after that, the road to the white house coverage starts with mitt romney at the winter meeting of the republican jewish coalition. >> this week, stephen goldsmith, currently the deputy mayor of new york city. during the 1990's, he was the mayor of indianapolis. >> stephen goldsmith, how would you describe the difference between being mayor of indianapolis for two terms and being deputy mayor of new york

city? >> a lot of differences. the only difference that is not insignificant now, i am an agent and no longer the principal. there is a difference in scale and complexity. to some extent, indianapolis is the 12th largest city in the country. many urban problems are common from place to place, particularly in tough financial times. it is fun and challenging. it is similar in a lot of ways as well. >> when did you decide to do this job and why? >> i am not sure exactly when. i was teaching at harvard, running and innovation center and doing a little consulting in cities around the country. i rode a book about the relationship between nonprofit shands and cities in governments.

there was a flattering portrait and i assume someone in the bloomberg administration saw that and appreciated my good sense of judgment. i said it was a strange idea and i was not sure if i was ready for it. it is the greatest city in the world, a large footprint, a place where reform and innovation would be appreciated, so how could i say no? >> how long have you been on the job? >> about six months. >> what was the first thing you notice once you got inside city hall? >> i am a great fan of bourbon -- urban spaces. i worked on and off with most of the large city mayors in the country in the last few decades. when i started as mayor of indianapolis, a group of us who were friends were elected mayors

of large cities at the time. this is a particularly interesting time for cities because revenues are down, expenses are up, a lot of stress and a lot of places, particularly in a protracted recession, although new york has been better off than a lot of cities. it is the common issues of people across the country struggling, but also the difficulty of injecting innovative reform in a really large bureaucracy, which also struck me as well. >> i have a lot of former things that you have written and also stories about you. what is the difference in being in the mayor of indianapolis and new york when it comes to the media? >> there is more here, and they are more aggressive.

the local home town paper which was both a cheerleader and could afford good investigative reporters, but they had a trick callings what in one sense and a cheerleader in the other, that has largely gone away. small stories become large. i enjoy social media, so i tweet from time to time. i tweeted a complement to our truck drivers who were working really long days in the sanitation department in a snowstorm, doing a good job. it turns out the timing was not so good because the job was not so good. that became a full page article in the newspaper on what i thought was a relatively innocuous category. the difference is that the high- profile of little mistakes and

big mistakes makes it difficult to pick up momentum for change. you try to encourage an environment of change and innovation, but that involves risk, and risk is exploited by aggressive newspaper reporters. that is just the way it is. it is difficult to build up the momentum for major changes with an aggressive press. >> in 1994, the big snowstorm in indianapolis, you happen to be in new york, and this time when the big snowstorm hit after christmas, you were in washington. they love to stick a needle in there. what did you say to them at the time? >> in indianapolis, we successfully fought the snow for eight years except once.

the lost ones, and unfortunately i was there for the warrants. the city of new york has a very professional sanitation department and does a terrific job on snow. the had the sixth largest snow in history in new york city, and lots of things went wrong. we learn from our mistakes and we will move on and correct them. >> why did it go wrong this time? >> there are a couple of lessons, some that are localized and others that are generalized. you have a very deliberate way that you approach the job, and it works every time. you execute that the same way. the same path does not always work. what we theron this time was that we did not have -- what we found was that we did not have accurate, up-to-date management data.

there were mistakes made by others. for example, 1000 buses got stuck. you look back and say, should you have declared an emergency? they made a fairly good faith decision that turned out not to be right. the point of the story is, it is easier to do monday morning quarterbacking. i think we learned that real- time management data, coupled with a little more in terms of delivered systems would have helped a lot. >> you were born in indianapolis, went to college at an all boys' school, went to the university of michigan and got a law degree and came back as a prosecutor, and then what? >> what i was wanted to do what i've always wanted to do is be mayor. i went to law school and practiced law in indianapolis and then tried do try to figure out how to break into politics

and decided to try to be elected district attorney/prosecutor. . accidentally onwon i served several terms and then got elected mayor of indianapolis. >> as you are going through those eight years, people were talking about you as being president some day, cabinet officer. you worked in the george w. bush administration. what was in your head at that time? >> it depends on what the time was. i thought at the time there is no better job than being a mayor. there's no jobbery to make up every day and see something that is broken or see a family that needs help and go solve it. if i had enough time, i could have done something for every citizen of indianapolis. mayor bloomberg had really long

days, and so did the rest of my friends who were mayors. it is a very motivating thing. it is not like giving speeches and pontificating. you can actually go out and do it. i determined i wanted to be the best mayor ever. we had a fair amount of success in many ways. i then ran for governor and lost in a campaign that was really not very good. i managed to raise a lot of money and do nothing wrong that i manage to pull out a defeat. i ran against a really nice guy who was very popular. we are salonga quite well. i was running on a platform of change -- we get along quite well. it was a very acrimonious primary, and that never healed over. one of the things that plagues , we years -- plagues mayor's

had a little police controversy, a police a brawl where police officers beat up some folks. if you are mayor and running for governor, you cannot things perfect in your city and it becomes an explosive issue in the campaign. i went back to being mayor. >> wanted to move to washington? >> my last year as mayor i became chief domestic policy advisor to george bush in the 2000 campaign and crafted his domestic agenda to some extent. my wife is from washington, and she wanted to go home. i did the transition for the campaign, and instead of working in the administration i went to harvard to teach. >> your wife, margaret, is a

podium for people who are not from india. -- not from indiana. >> my wife's mother is sister to dan quayle. i think the reporters, in order to prove their fierce independence, overcompensated. i don't know what i would say about the news pages. it comes back to your earlier question. i believe in change. in order to make life different for the folks who live in your community, that means every second counts. a change agenda sets up an executive branch elected official for one newspaper story

after another. if you maintain a mediocre status quo, nobody complains. if you try to jump and just go up seven steps instead of 10, there are always folks who may have been moved or demoted or changed, groups that don't win quite as much. he set yourself up for a garage of articles. what was perceived as overcompensating news reporting may have just been the natural result of reproducing a lot of stuff. i would say two-thirds of it worked and one-third did not. that is a lot of newspaper articles. >> for what you are doing faith based work in the white house for president bush. why did you take that job? >> let me back of a few years in answering a question.

i got elected mayor because i wanted to help indianapolis and i thought the way to help was to look at the communities that are most neglected and had the greatest number of problems since world war two, in the typical urban areas. i look back a few years after that and said which communities are working in which not? ones that are working are the ones where the government was involved in a cooperative exercise with neighborhood leadership, were people in the community care and work together to solve problems. it is a partnership. it turns out that the most common asset in those communities is a faith based institution in the urban

communities. so we began to partner with those. these were small churches. we intentionally that how we could help them. do they need computers for their preschool? what else could we do to help them expand? could we allow them to clean up the neighborhood park and use it? what it led to, governor bush announcing his campaign for governor -- for president in indianapolis at one of those institutions. that is one of the armies of compassion speech. it is a wonderful speech. that evolved to the faith based initiative in the white house. to me, it was just one element of how government should participate with nonprofits, for profits, and faith based

institutions to create a fabric, a network that makes this city work well. and help set up the office, but instead of leading a, i went up to harvard to teach and became chairman of the volunteer job. i worked in the white house one day and then went off to teach. >> in the middle of all this, you were put on the fannie mae board in 2002. they don't say foundation board. >> i am quick to say that. i know fannie mae had its issues. republicans were anxious about fannie mae at the time and freddie mac. i was interested in affordable housing as mayor. the fannie mae foundation invested in community leadership, so it was not even

inside the fayed corporation itself. it was a separate entity. >> one thing is that no one has talked about in the fannie mae thing was that president bush stopped putting members on the board. i have only found that in one place a long time ago, we call to try to find out from fame may how the process worked. we got no answer, no feedback. why did he not nominate people to be on the board after a certain time? >> i am not actually sure. there was a time there when they reached an impasse in the white house stopped nominating people. there were somewhat inconsistent goals under several presidents. one is to drive up home ownership as much as possible. the other was not to take

imprudent risk with respect to loans. i think he can do both -- i think you can do both, but the mission of fame as a corporation began to concentrate more on one than the other and it became problematic. >> i am going to grab a couple of articles here and ask about them. you were on board as deputy mayor of new york city. what is the difference in being an operations deputy mayor than the rest of them? some where you said you'd rather have somebody else's debbie meier job. >> one thing that drew me to new york is i wanted to start -- somebody else is the deputy mayor job. one deputy mayor has done some remarkable stuff on homelessness and affordable housing. she does social services and someone else does education and economic development.

i do the mechanics of government, police, fire, sanitation, budget. when i had it been interviewed by a "the times, go i said i would be happy to trade places with her. >> there are 50,000 policemen here, which is bigger than all of the government of indianapolis. >> there are more police officers and their art total employees of indianapolis -- then there are total employees of indianapolis, yes. there are up about 350,000 public employees in new york. that means one out of every 2.5 people in indianapolis would be a public employee in new york. >> how many people report directly to you? >> i don't know, somewhere between zero and 100,000.

it depends on how you look at it. but mayor bloomberg has done is attract a number of very professional, senior managers inside his government. the people are on fire. they know those departments well. they are very committed. they don't need me to tell them how to manage their day-to-day stuff. when some of our systems are antiquated and we need broader based reform, i look at myself as a colleague who can produce some of those results. >> what is the size of your budget under the operations area? >> i have never totally counted it up. it is probably $15 million or $20 million. >> what was your indianapolis budget? >> $1 million. >> city taken to cleaners on fleet car wash these. new york is on track to spend more than $400,000 this year

just to wash its cars. that includes paying as much as $110 to clean a little toyota trieste's. how in the world can you spend $263 to clean a truck? >> i thought it was a little bit high. in indiana, you put four quarters in a machine and spray water on it. one of the problems you have with this much scale is, it is an easy excuse not to pay attention to the pennies and quarters. it is obviously more than that, but every car wash counts. no more bottled water in the offices. we don't need it. we can either drink it out of the tap or we can buy it in drums. we don't need to buy bottled

water. >> new york has some of the best water of any city. >> we do. you can justify bottle of water, car wash, one sided copy paper. i still have a little icon on the city's website that says give me your ideas if you think we can improve city government. in the first two weeks i got 3000 responses. some of them are pretty good. you have to say to folks, this is a city where a lot of people are struggling and yet paying taxes. every dollar you spend as the dollar they don't have, so you better spend it well. >> what happened about the trucks and cars being washed? >> we got the price down and eliminated some of the details.

we are going for it. then the question becomes, why do we have so many cars? do people pay for the cars they take home? each one is a cascading set of questions that lead some savings. we should not be spending where we do not needed. >> here is one from october of last year. explain that one. >> there is a lot to be said for public-private partnerships. everyday our employees do a good job on what is inside their portfolio, and they need a car. another group of companies are

in the business of renting cars. they lease cars by the hour of the day, and they find that their weekends are really a valuable time. we don't need many cars on the weekend. why do they have to be individualize? how can they make money of those cars and bring down our unit cost? a pilot worked pretty well in that transportation department. they rent cars to the general public and we are not using them, and the price comes down. we put a billion dollars into infrastructure, and the quality went up. you have to be creative about how you structure these things. >> did you have a lot of unions in indianapolis? >> one of the differences in

indianapolis and new york is that i started off in a rocky way with unions in indianapolis. i campaigned on privatization. i abandon privatization because i used to go out -- let me back up. i got elected on privatization. i went out and visited the people who pick up the trash. they tell me what they thought about my privatization agenda. i vividly remember how they talk to me. i was thinking about john lindsay and the strikes the day i got elected mayor of indianapolis. he was a really smart fellow but had a lot of labor problems. we reached an agreement. i will go out and work with you and pick up the trash. i will do the plumbing in public housing. i will love the grass. give me six months and i will be back. i got a lot of good ideas from

those workers. the problem was not the workers, it was the public system. it was a command and control system that sucked the energy and indiscretion out of our work force. the difference between indianapolis and new york is that over time, they became partners. they got paid more and their productivity went up. but they had to bid and take some risk. the managers in indianapolis were not unionized. the workers in new york city, the police and cops and sanitation workers, have the same attitude. we want to be paid a fair wage but we are here because we want to make a difference for new york city. it is more difficult because there are 200 units and they are layered on top of each other and crisscrossed with civil service rules that make it very difficult for people to exercise discretion in the same way they

did in indianapolis. >> when i checked out at a hotel and de -- today, my bill included 16% tax. if you go to indianapolis, it is not like that. first of all, the rooms are very expensive here and they are often full. what is it about people that come here who are willing to take all these taxes? >> and that is lower than it used to be. >> the city is much more livable. it is one of the safest cities in the country. it is a fun place to be, and people come from all over the world. they are willing to pay a price for that. it is not just your hotel room, but your tax on top of it. the good news for folks who are visiting new york, the out of

town dollar helps support a very large infrastructure. bringing the tourist dollar here works, and york city tourists and hotels had a record year last year. people are coming in record numbers, even in tough times, and paying a price. >> another thing, at this time i noticed -- and i know this is not new. i was here during the sanitation workers' strike, but three times a week to see these huge piles on the sidewalk of green bags full of garbage, and they are put out at night and picked up some time the next day. why is that? >> some of those are commercial trash and some are city trash. it is a very dense city. lots of folks and not many places to put the trash.

some areas get picked up multiple times a week, sometimes twice a week. it is a pretty elaborate structure. there is nowhere else to put the trash but out in front. >> where do you don't at all? >> a long, complicated story. some of it gets put into containers and taken to landfills outside of the city. we are investigating better ways to handle it. there is really no place today in new york city for this trash. >> what is the farthest away you take some of your trash? >> i am not sure. if i knew, i am not sure i would want to say. >> but it does go out of state? >> yes. in terms of transportation and cost, there are communities that create jobs with this, but there is a lot of new technology in terms of energy from waste

that are really important, particularly in this environmental situation. i think we can make a difference by doing more disposal locally. >> november 2, 2010. the headline is "new york city eliminates christmas cards." >> i was trying to become scrooge, and i guess i succeeded. >> what was the reaction to that? >> it was not too bad. i was trying to make a point. we were laying off employees.

taxes are as high as they can go. i think it was right. people can differ on this issue. the folks with money or the most mobile. they can move most easily. they can take their money and their tax rate and move to pennsylvania or florida or wherever. on the income-tax side, there are very few people who pay a large percentage -- a very few people pay a large percentage of the taxes. you cannot tax your way into a balanced budget. you cannot redistribute your way out. you have to create wealth and jobs. there is a limit to the tax increases. on the income-tax side, the mayor is exactly right. there's no room for additional

taxes. >> if you live here, how many additional taxes do you pay? >> you pay sales tax and personal income tax and property tax. >> the you pay personal income tax to the city of new york and to the state? >> right. and they are not insignificant taxes. if you don't are very much money, you don't pay the taxes. they say just increase the tax rate, and we say that does not work. the goal now is to get expenses under control. the expanding york city economy has produced in come that has allowed government to be maintained at the size is, but that does not work over time because the retiree and pension costs are going up so dramatically that they exceed the new revenues by a

substantial margin. >> back to the important issue of christmas cards and the double sided sheet and all. we make a decision like this, do you have to get the mayor to approve it, or is this the kind of thing that you can just do? >> we have an office -- the mayor does not believe in walz. he sits in 1 kibo: i sit in another cubicle. >> is that the only office you have? >> yes -- he sits in one cubicle and i sit in another cubicle. there are 150 people in that room. he is in the center and i am next to him. i know what his policies are. i know when he wants to be brief and i know when there is a close call. and something like that, i would essentially just turned to him and say, i really don't think we ought to -- i cannot believe

that some of these agencies send out christmas cards and we don't have any money. he says, that is absurd, stop it. >> are all the deputy mayors around you? >> they are down a row, i guess you would say. >> do you know of any other city that does this? >> he was the first, and then d.c. followed. a lot of mayors like substantial offices. i think it is great. makes him excess of will and makes information democratically available. if someone wants to ask a question, they just walk up. people want to see me, walked up. >> what if you want to have a private meeting? >> we have three of what you would call conference rooms, but what i would call tables at the

front of the room. there is a handful of private rooms, but it works. >> mayor bloomberg started with the bloomberg company and he had the same thing in that room. he was sitting in the middle of the room. you walk in the door and his desk was right at the right hand side there. that seems to be a very important symbol of some kind. what does it do? >> the free flow of information is what creates value. the problem with government generally, outside of that room, indianapolis or new york, is that there are walls. there are liberal walz and virtual walls. there are walls between agencies, and every time you have a wall, you lose the flow of information. the new lose collaboration and value.

it is a very important functioning apparatus. >> is the police chief in that room? >> no. deputy mayors are in that room and press folks and government relations folks. the commissioners are out with their department, at police headquarters and fire, etc. texted you intend to do the same thing next year on christmas cards? >> we are done with christmas cards. >> here is another headline. "new york cut software deal with microsoft." this is the language of the story.

explain that one. >> that is actually a big deal for microsoft and for the city. it also represents more than just the technology contract. the government has to accept an existing model, and it becomes too expensive, they have to figure out how to bargain down the cost of it. we do not want to pay a licensing fee for every desktop computer that uses that software, which had been the microsoft model. we have different scale users. what you want to do is buy the access that you want, and then you want to move employees to whatever level of performance they need. basically we said to microsoft,

we want a competitive price where we are not paying for every single desktop or laptop. we want an incentive to reduce the use, not increase it. let's make sure we have the best of collaborative tools. we saved $50 million, not an insignificant amount of money, and we will decrease -- increase the availability of these tools to all our workers. >> is your personal goal to slice $500 billion from the budget? >> at least. i would like to measure it in billions. $500 million really isn't that difficult, in the sense that you can see it and do it. there are some bureaucratic obstacles. a lot of this is shared services. we have 10,002 many desk.

we have a scattered in different places. how do you shrink the footprint? who is responsible for all the accounts receivable? who is responsible for the fleet? we have 50, 75, i don't know how many garages. just consolidate them. the same is true of the hour servers. shrink, consolidate, and organize. >> what is the biggest, most important project under desk right now. >> the biggest project is to liberate the work force. we operate under a set of really archaic rules. basically, this is the city of tammany hall. this is the city where progressive government was in large part created.

over the last hundred years, in order to make sure that mayors did not hire their friends and give contracts to their buddies, there are lots of rules. if 100 rules are good, 1000 rules are good, and 10,000 rules are good. the way we have stop the use of discretion is by eliminating discretion. the challenge now is to inject a new sense of public service, brought banding, fewer jobs classifications, more authority over procurement, more liberty about what the state capital can do. we need to create a post progressive form of government where we have as our obligation, solving the problems of visitors and citizens. if you want a restaurant license

in new york city, you have to go to like 20 different places. you have to get several different licenses. the example that strikes me, the analogy or metaphor it was be as if mcdonald's set up for restaurants and said it go to one restaurant and by your bun, another for french fries at, and you can put them together if you want. that is what the mayor wants us to change. >> is still have a connection with harvard? >> i am on leave from harvard. >> say you have a boston possible location in the future. born in indianapolis, your wife

lives in washington. >> for a little while longer. i hope she will live in new york shortly. >> your inner room over here at columbia university? >> yes. >> how long do you want to be deputy mayor, and do you intend to go back to harvard? >> i have to get the near term figure out. i like harvard, but i love new york city a lot and i am excited about the fact that my wife is moving here. i will be able to get out of my dorm room at columbia and be able to see and enjoy a great city. i have an opportunity to serve. the only reason to take this job is to serve. there is no other real reason. i like new york city and want to see if i can make a difference. i know i want to do this job longer than two years.

in the meantime, we will see what happens. >> do you want to run for mayor here? >> i don't think so. i have had a chance to be mayor. i am now here as deputy mayor. i wish the next mayor of new york city well, but it is not going to be me. >> has there been any time when you said your wife or anybody, this was a mistake? >> i would say it is a little more arduous than i had thought. i realize the scale and complexity of it. i come from a school that these are opportunities in life and your supposed to make the best of them for others, and every second counts. there is a sense that the bureaucracy and the procurement rules and the like are stacked against instant action. i don't mind the day today toughness. i just need to start knocking down the milestones. we are just finally at a point

where we are getting things and improving park service's. if we can use the last 2.5 years of a truly great mayor's term to reorganize and reposition the city for the future, it will be well worth it. >> i want to ask you about this paragraph from january of this year. this is all about the snow. you were obscure in january.

when you read that, is it one of those things that you say, they will never accept me because i am not from there? >> ed was a great deputy mayor. he is younger than me. i don't think i could actually kedge muggers. there are a couple of things in that article. i think there is a view, you are not from here, therefore, what do you have to offer? that is pretty typical of any city and a little more typical in new york. i will show them i am up to the job. i am not worried about that. the second implication in that story is also interesting. it is the following, the mayor

said i want to be of michaud bold reforms we are doing in the third term. i have a responsibility for operations, but i have the same attitude as the mayor. he is recruiting really talented people to run these agencies. the police commissioner does not need me to wander over and tell him to reposition his officers. i need to collaborate and work with him and help him inject more technology and fixed budget issues, but he does not need me to run his department. i actually believe that the thesis of that article is off a little bit. i am not sure that is what you want from your deputy mayor of operations. i have a responsibility to watch the details, and 16 hours a day i am watching the details of city government. >> if you get up at 5:00, and what do you do then? >> i work out so that i don't go

prematurely crazy from my job. >> how do you work out? >> i use an electrical for about 45 minutes or an hour at a sports club and that i head off to work and try to make sure i am the first one in and the last one out. that is a have died developed from my earlier days. i work through the grind of the day's issues and how we are moving on to bigger matters. it is a good day. i enjoy the challenge and the long days. city hall has a little cafe or food corner. if you are careful, you can exist on lettuce, celery, and carrots and lots of coffee. works really well. >> in your life, if you look back on people you know or

inspiration she had, who would you sing aloud, people -- who would you single out, people that matter to you? what did your mom and dad do? or they alive? >> my mom is alive. she is in indianapolis. she is a housewife, prada of what she has produced in her kids. at 88, she is a competitive bridge player, which i hope is a good sign for me. my dad was a builder. when i was in college, the mayor of indianapolis was the first really honest and really smart, confident mayor of indianapolis.

indianapolis was a really tough place back then. i was at a forum of indianapolis mayor's recently. when i was in public high school and the president of the school board wrote me a note and said keep up your public service. his name is dick lugar. i think those folks who served honorably can be a great source of inspiration. >> who else in the world of philosophy or national leadership or world leaders has gotten your attention? >> i have an interest in policy. i consume a lot of policy, probably from the center or center-right think tanks.

i found my way to the manhattan institute's, located not far from where we are talking today. what was interesting about them is that they cared a lot about cities but they thought in nontraditional ways. how should taxing limitations work? how do people get along together? whether you start with james q. wilson or other folks who kind of think about slightly different ways from accepted political orthodoxy about the way things should work. >> have changed your mind at all on privatization of government functions? >> in indianapolis, we did the largest waste water and airport privatization. today, i would say it differently.

i don't think privatization is the answer for cities, but i don't think public monopolies or the answers. is really the way the public and private sector work together that is the answer. sometimes it is competitive. sometimes it is outsourcing. in new york city we are actually bringing something cn. for the private sector to perform well, and has to be well managed by professional employers. and things grow a lot, both sides are off. i am trying to bring some jobs then and since some jobs out and try to get it right. it is more the nature of the agency and the city. >> when did you take something private that worked the best? >> waste water, which is

generally a government run operation. we offered it up for bids and ended up not selling the assets aren't bringing in a very large international manager. the manager except in our union and our leadership. it turns out a few years later, accidents have been reduced by 90% and grievances have been reduced. pay went up, there was something of the management structures. it was not the public employees that are holding us back. it was an international company with more ph.d.'s then i had employees. when you get that combination, it works quite well. >> what is your philosophy of joining? i have a list, a full page of things you have done in your life. we have gone over some of them.

what did you learn and what did you do? >> i accidentally ended up there. it is government corporation that owns national service agenda. republicans have always been anxious about and viewed it as a president clinton thing. that therefore wanted to do away with it. i had a conversation with incoming president bush. i said why not just changing rather than do away with it. the whole conversation was about 16 seconds long. therefore i became involved. i think your question gives me an opportunity to make a point, which is that we need to think carefully about the role of government. sometimes government usurps communities rights and tells them how to operate.

it imposes rules on their behavior. it drops in government programs. in hard-pressed urban neighborhoods, if you just withdraw government, those places are not going to be immediately resilience. kids in those opportunities do not have opportunities in life. one thing we can do is provide infrastructure for volunteer service. an americorps member who helps teach reading our mentoring in an new york city high school, or habitat for humanity, or teach for america, those organizations have a place. i tried to create a bipartisan consensus and convince democrats that these young adults should be out on liberal causes. if there is a place where there it right and left in me, i wanted to prove it. under both presidents bush and obama, we created a true buyout

-- bipartisan organization. >> how many presidents have you worked for? >> i have been fortunate enough to have been invited here and there -- president reagan pointed me to the missing and exploited children's board. there are not too many republican mayors, so you tend to get included in thanks just by number. i have been fortunate to see a lot of really great people. >> what did you see up close with george w. bush that either impressed you, or what is your overall opinion of his presidency? >> i am just a local mayor, so i don't want to evaluate his presidency. i was fortunate enough to be able to help on domestic policy, and i was pleased that he

followed through and implemented most of those things that we had worked on. i appreciated the fact that he was a man of principle and good for his word. >> how close do you get to making political statements these days in this job? >> i can say pretty much what i wanted as mayor and the only person that got in trouble was me. now i have a boss, and he has a series of comments. i have to make sure i don't say anything that would cause trouble. i am not here for political purposes. i am really not. in my first speech i got a lot of questions on social policy. i am not here for social policy. there are important social

issues. i am here to try to make the streets a little cleaner and a little bit safer and the tax dollars go little bit farther, and prove that large cities have a really vibrant future. i steer away from things that will detract from that agenda. >> i remember when a congressman left congress and became administrative assistant to senator paul simon. an elected official going to work for someone who is also an elected official who was out of a job. you have done the same thing in some respects. you were the mayor of a city and out of the deputy mayor. we recommend that your best friends? >> no, i don't think so. i think it was a big step for me, but it requires a couple of things. it requires a mayor who is not

threatened by his own staff. he has enough self-confidence to know where he is going, to challenge people in large part, and then lets them be successful. michael bloomberg is a very unusual guy. secondly, there is a big difference between being a principal and an agent. you have to be pretty clear about what your new job is unwilling to accept that. mayor's use their public profile to set their agenda and drive their agenda. or drivingyor's their bosses agenda. they may feel the same and the perfectly line, but you have to remember, it is your boss's agenda, not your personal agenda. i would not recommended to too many people. >> we are out of time. we look forward to your book after you are out of all this. thank you very much.

[captioning performed by national captioning institute] [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2011] >> for a dvd copy of this program, call1-877-662-7726. for free transcripts or to give us your comments, visit us online. "q&a" programs are also available as c-span podcasts. >> next, british prime minister david cameron at the house of commons. then, former massachusetts governor mitt romney and las vegas, and kentucky senator and paul in iowa. at 11:00 p.m., "q&a" new york city deputy mayor stephen

goldsmith. tomorrow on "washington journal," a look at the week in congress, including the federal budget negotiations and the stop-gap federal spending bill that is due to expire on april 8. a talk about the middle east protests, and john dalla volpe has the results of his group's latest poll on political ideology of the millennial generation, ages 18-29. "washington>> now, from london,e minister's questions from the british house of commons. prime minister david cameron offered an update on libya, specifically commenting on the specifically commenting on the issue