I know from my own life that you can’t move forward unless you reach out and deal honestly with the past. The truth is that when it comes to race and class, Boston has a lot of unfinished business. We must not be afraid to talk about it.

The Affordable Care Act is a huge problem. [Repealing the ACA is] going to have huge implications. We have millennials that live in Boston that are on their parents' health insurance. The businesses have hired them and have been able to hire more people because they have been able to be on their own health insurance. We have seniors in our city who have preexisting conditions, or something called a "donut hole," which is a prescription drug [gap] in Medicare. Whatever changes they make could have detrimental effects on people's health care, but also on the economy.

You can't really move forward if you don't heal the past and identify and address the fact that you had a problem and in some cases still have issues. That has to be dealt with.

As a mayor, I don't make my decisions based upon whether it is a "Democrat" issue. You make your decisions based upon the people you represent as a city to move our city forward.

Even though we all might have differences, there's commonality in the sense [that] people are hard-working, people want to raise a family, people want to put a roof over their head, people want to put food on their table, people want good things for their children.

When you go to urban America and you look at cities around America. People are moving back into the cities at record numbers. In the 1980s it was a flight to the suburbs. And now in 2017, it's a flight back into the cities.

The millennial that lives in a very red state might not even realize that their congressman thinks that they have no constituents that feel the opposite of what the president or they are doing. This is the time to step up and push back.