"You do sense that your time is running out, absolutely. That really begins as you start your second-to-last year, the year that Mayor Street's starting now.

Say you're about to sit down and talk about an economic development deal. You realize that the development that you're putting together won't open up, and the city won't see jobs, until after you're gone. So, the first realization is, you're planning on things that won't come to fruition until you're gone. That's not too bad because you're setting things in motion.

Where the clock really begins to tick is when you realize you might not be in a position to actually finish the deal, where if a deal is not done on the Friday before you're out and you can't finish it, you don't know if the person coming in after you is going to finish it. You worry about not having it done.

In terms of how do you act, and how do you still get things done, you have to realize that you still have power. A lame duck is as a lame duck acts. If you start to think of yourself, and if the people you work with start to think of the administration like that, and they're looking for their next jobs, that psychology will set in. If you consider yourself that, and act like that, everybody else will treat you like a lame duck.

The one thing I prided myself on is that I convinced everybody to take advantage of every day we had there. I got paid for [eight] years, so I was not going put it on autopilot for six months. I wanted the same high-intensity administration, the same enthusiasm, the same focus on Dec. 31 of my last year as we had on Jan. 7 of the first year. And the way I acted and carried myself, as a result, I had an inordinate number of people there with me on my last day as we had early on. I'm trying to remember exactly what it was, but the Saturday before I left office, we signed a letter for a development deal. That's the way I wanted to handle myself.

It's human nature that when you see the time's running out, you'll think about what's next for you. And to some extent I was further challenged because in mid-October of my last year, I was named the Democratic Party Chair. But my advice is use every day you have there. If you don't want people to think of you as a lame duck, don't act like one. It's just a mind-set, but it's one that you can imbue upon the people you work with and then upon the outside world. I mean, we were absolutely cooking on many different fronts right up to the last day.

[The transition] was easier for me because I had John Street, who'd been City Council president and knew more about city politics than anybody, succeeding me. If I'd have had some businessman coming in as mayor, somebody who knew nothing about the way City Hall worked, I would have had to spend a lot of November and December to get them acclimated and that certainly would have stopped things up a bit."