Welcome to Off Message. I'm Isaac Dover. Today's guest, New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrum.

We caught up with him in Miami Beach, where he had just become officially president of the Conference of Mayors, which is a bipartisan, nonpartisan group of all the mayors around the country, about 1,500 of them,

Republicans, Democrats, people who were elected in nonpartisan elections.

Landrieu gave a speech as he took over that had a lot in it about the role that he thinks

mayors have to play at this particular moment, including this line.

American greatness is alive and well in cities and towns across the country, from urban to rural to

suburban, from coast to coast.

As I said to him in the interview, when you talk about American greatness, it's pretty clear

he's talking about President Trump and his response to what he sees out of the White House, out of Congress, out of Washington

overall. And as you'll hear, he was pretty firm in his argument that there is not much to be

counted on coming out of Washington. And that's why you need, in his opinion, mayors who are talking about things, not through the political spectrum, but through what actually gets done.

We also talked a lot about a speech that he delivered earlier this year when he removed the last of the Confederate monuments from New Orleans.

There were death threats, he said. There were city contractors who were

refusing to work on it. But to him it was a lesson about what can happen, the way that there's

more there than maybe people have anticipated. It also was to him a lesson about what mayors

can do, that there was a speech that he gave as the mayor of New Orleans about a local

issue, Confederate monuments in his city, that became a national issue. And to the mayors, he said

that is a promise of just how much they can get done and how much of a role they can play

in the national conversation. Fascinating conversation, after a long weekend for him going through all of this that ended in a party on Sunday night

that he got up on stage and played the washboard for really getting in touch with the New Orleans spirit.

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