New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu denied he’s thinking about running for president in 2020, but acknowledged the chatter out there about his possible run.
“I’m not thinking about that. Other people have talked about that, and honestly it’s very flattering to think about it, but I don’t see that happening as it relates to me,” the Democratic mayor said on ABC’s “This Week.”
“And [I] would say this to the people of America: We shouldn’t wait on whoever the president is to fix our problems. If all Americans did something kind every day, we could move the country fairly quickly in a whole lot of different ways.”
Landrieu was on the show promoting his new book, In The Shadows of Statues: A White Southerner Confronts History.
While he might not be declaring his candidacy for president yet, Landrieu spent the interview speaking in the rhetoric of a presidential candidate.
He said it’s time for the country to get back to being respectful to one another and trying to bridge the partisan divide.
“It is clear to me that we have to get back to being respectful, being civil, to seeing each other and judging each other based on our behavior, not race, not creed, not class, not sexual orientation or necessarily what country you come from and we’re being too loose with that right now,” he said.
He also touted his ability to make tough decisions.
“You don’t run away from the issues. What you have to do is run to the tough issues in order to find common ground,” he said.
“As a matter of fact, it’s one of the problems people have in the country with politics. Today we actually run away from the tough issues. You have to trust in the people that you work with enough to know that if you can call the question on things that are hard for us, that we can actually figure out.”
