I think our communication strategy has been very disciplined as being a back-to-basics mayor and about focusing on making City Hall work and jumpstarting our economy.
I've very proud to be mayor of our great city. It's a city with a heart and a soul. Chicago has a unique spirit. Our business community wants to give back.
From my very first day in the Mayor's office, I have worked closely with the Council members who share our vision of a city hall that really protects taxpayers and cares... yes... about the little things that make a big difference in people's lives.
Now it's time to focus on basics for people in our neighborhoods... and real ethics reform at City Hall.
What has been happening the last four years in City Hall is that they have been closing recreation centers, closing libraries. We have not looked after our children in City Hall.
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.
We have to have a mayor who is going to be independent, particularly of our city labor unions, to ensure that the dollars that we have saved are reinvested back into our neighborhoods.
We have to come back to basics: learning how to take care of ourselves. Not only learning to love our bodies - and that's a good beginning - but to take care of our bodies and ourselves by learning how to eat and how to think. I think living is really about thoughts and food, and we've got to get back to basics.
I think that our work and our music stands on its own without this knowledge about our identity around it. But I also think that we very consciously decided not to hold back that part of ourselves, but to be very vocal about who we are, kind of what experiences we've had in life, and how we identify.
Having been a mayor, we prioritized based on where we want our city and our country to go.
I think we've been a lot more disciplined with our bowling. Our batting at times has been more disciplined as well.
Now and again, you may be picking a pass or two in behind, making something happen, but when we're attacking - especially at Liverpool - I'm focusing on protection, being disciplined, being careful, worrying about counter-attacks, things like that.
Our vanity, our passions, our spirit of imitation, our abstract intelligence, our habits have long been at work, and it is the task of art to undo this work of theirs, making us travel back in the direction from which we have come to the depths where what has really existed lies unknown within us.
I think in modern communication studies, we put a lot of emphasis on our relationships and our family relationships. Our relationships with our parents, and our siblings. I felt that there was this gap in content about communication with people who are super close to you in your peer group.
In many ways, our campaign this year will be the same as last time: We're still going to focus on fixing up basics and cleaning up ethics at City Hall.
I think this kind of bohemianism doesn't really exist in the New York city anymore - the bohemianism that I was trying to record in Carnegie Hall that completely defined our culture. The people who lived and worked in Carnegie Hall studios, they defined our culture in music, dance, theater, fashion, illustration. It wasn't so much nostalgic as a celebration of that and an acknowledgment of that and saying that it's really important. And it's actually something that is a loss for the city, I think.
I think we're proving ourselves as we go along. The past several months our strategy has been evolutionary - making maximum advantage of our client browser, as well as our enterprise software for people who want to build Web sites.