Alabama Mayor-Elect Steven Reed on His Historic Election

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: What do you think is most important to start with? What sort of keeps you up at night about what you need to do?

MAYOR-ELECT STEVEN REED (D-MONTGOMERY-AL): I think the thing that we have to start with is education, because I see that as the root cause of a lot of other issues that we’re dealing with. And I believe that if we’re really to be intentional or deliberate about what we have to do to transform our public education system to make sure that everyone, regardless of their neighborhood or ZIP code, has an equal chance at opportunity, then we can achieve some of the other accomplishments and objectives that we really have out there. Now, listen, I certainly know that the list you just read is a long and challenging list. I’m aware of that and it’s not something I expect to happen overnight, but it is something I expect us to make progress in. It is something that I expect for us to impact in a more positive manner. That’s why people elect leaders, and that is to not maintain the status quo but to change it. And one of the things that I ran on was I didn’t want to be the thermometer anymore and take the temperature of the city, but I wanted to be the thermostat so I could set the temperature of the city. And that means being very ambitious, that means being very deliberate and being very honest about what our issues are and how we go about changing some of those issues. And that only happens by acknowledging that we have a problem and then working to solve it.

AMANPOUR: Mayor-Elect, how will you grade or rate your ability to work across party lines? Your father, obviously, for decades has chaired the Alabama Democratic conference. You grew up in a political household. People remember you, apparently, from seeing you as a young boy in church, and a lot of people are obviously incredibly proud of your accomplishments. But you do have a Republican legislature, you have a Republican governor and you may eventually get another Republican senator. We’ll talk about this in a second with Jeff Sessions wanting to recontest that seat there. But what can you as a Democratic mayor do in this environment?

REED: Well, the old saying is, you know, all politics is local. And so, we want to make sure that we’re working with all of our stakeholders and all of our elected officials, both state and federal, as well as, obviously, our local city council to really address the issues. And I look at them from a partisan perspective. We want to look at them from a citizen perspective of what’s going to be best for the citizens of Montgomery, what’s going to be best for the citizens of Alabama. And I believe if we take some of the partisanship out of some of our discussions, we could meet in the middle and we could find that common ground. That’s what we did in the campaign. That’s how we were able to win with almost two-thirds of the vote. We were able to reach across lines to really bring people into a shared perspective that we have for our future.