In this year’s presidential campaign, America seems all tractor pulls, county fairs, town halls and truck stops. Candidates clad in plaid scramble for photo ops, stump in wheatfields and scarf down corn dogs at county fairs. Yet more than 80 percent of Americans live in cities. By relentlessly courting rural voters in the early primary states presidential candidates risk ignoring the bread-and-butter issues that matter most to most Americans–housing, mass transportation, crime and crumbling urban infrastructure. Each candidate should, of course, have an urban agenda. But what is it? What should it be?

Mayor TV, a new collaborative project of The Nation and the Drum Major Institute for Public Policy, asks the people who know our cities best: America’s mayors. In ten lively and insightful interviews, the mayors of Atlanta, Baltimore, Boston, Buffalo, Denver, Los Angeles, Miami, Minneapolis, Rochester and Salt Lake City offer their prescriptions for a reinvigorated urban agenda and, in many cases, issue their own presidential endorsements.

The contrast between the mayors’ priorities and the presidential candidates’ rhetoric couldn’t be more stark. “In presidential elections, the media and pollsters focus on issues like war, abortion, gay rights, things that, quite frankly, for those of us in the trenches, aren’t the hot-button issues,” says Miami Mayor Manny Diaz in a taped interview. “People want to know that their kids will get a good education, that their neighborhoods will be safe and clean…. It’s difficult for me to understand how presidential candidates don’t see that. Those are the issues that affect Americans each and every day. We [mayors] are dealing with them, and [candidates] should also be dealing with them.”

The challenges and frustrations of urban America are evident in these interviews, but even more apparent are the exciting ways in which theses mayors are taking the lead to innovate new solutions to old problems. MayorTV videos can be found on the VideoNation YouTube channel, TheNation.com and MayorTV.com.

The Mayors’ Responses:

LA Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa Salt Lake City Mayor Rocky Anderson Baltimore Mayor Sheila Dixon Buffalo Mayor Byron Brown Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybak Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper Atlanta Mayor Shirley Franklin Miami Mayor Manny Diaz

Rochester Mayor Bob Duffy Boston Mayor Tom Menino