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"The president can't worry about what's politically popular; he's been elected to be the president of the United States and he's taking on the tough issues right now. He's not going to be popular -- every one of these issues are contentious, otherwise we would have solved those problems a long time ago. What he should do is go out there and say, 'I was elected to lead from the front, not from the back,' and do that. And the American public isn't stupid. The American public, even when they don't like what you do, if they think you're doing it fromn the heart -- if they think you've got good ideas, if they think you've consulted and tried to build a consensus and work with people in a non-partisan way -- they're gonna come behind him. Maybe not day one, but he's gotta build a legacy, and he's gotta start right now, and I think he's starting to do it." -- Michael Bloomberg, mayor of New York, on the NBC television program Meet The Press, 2009-03-22.
[As ever, when transcribing speech myself, I wind up second-guessing myself regarding how faithfully to record exactly the syllables uttered when they can be considered features of an accent ("gonna", "gotta") and how much to gently adjust things closer to what the speaker would have written, if he had not been speaking aloud and extemporaneously ("going to", "got to") ... and the usual uncertainty as to punctuation (which pauses are full-stops interrupted by the sudden arrival of the next thought, and which introduce parenthetical or appositive phrases. I'm not sure, barring a chance to ask Mayor Bloomberg to transcribe the passage himself, that there is a single, clearly correct punctuation.]