Being mayor has its perks. Just ask Peter Carlisle. In November, he rolled out the red carpet for 21 world leaders from the Asia-Pacific region — including President Barack Obama and first lady Michelle Obama — arriving in Honolulu for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation biannual summit.

The global impact of those high-level talks was still being analyzed when a scant three months later Carlisle found himself welcoming a friend of the world.

"I got to meet the Dalai Lama," Carlisle recalled in a recent interview. "And I got to listen to him, and I got to see how he behaves and I got to learn from him."

Among those lessons was one of patience and forgiveness.

"If somebody tries to get you angry … you forgive them immediately, but then you hold them accountable," Carlisle says. "Because if you don’t, you let that horrible person control your feelings, and you don’t want to let them do that."

It’s a lesson Carlisle tries to keep in mind as he closes out his first two years in office and tries to convince voters to give him four more.

The re-election campaignhas had its share of confrontational moments, particularly in the televised debates, as the incumbent fends off challenges from former city Managing Director Kirk Caldwell and former two-term Gov. Ben Cayetano.

Cayetano’s entry to the race comes after he supported Carlisle in his run two years ago when he defeated Caldwell in a special election. But the former governor has come out of retirement to try to stop Carlisle on the issue upon which the race hinges: rail transit.

Carlisle inherited the rail project and hasn’t looked back, signing the contract to build rail cars, breaking ground and planting the first column for the $5.26 billion rail line, and submitting the city’s application for $1.55 billion in federal funds anticipated for the system.

It hasn’t been without speed bumps. The contract for the rail cars with Ansaldo Honolulu has come under scrutiny for being awarded too quickly and because of financial troubles Ansaldo’s parent company is going through. And the administration faced numerous critics when it was learned that the city’s self-imposed 20 percent debt ceiling had quietly been suspended by Managing Director Doug Chin.

Carlisle found himself front and center on those issues.

"We need people to tell us what we’re doing wrong so we can do it better," he says of the critics. "So I am always very, very interested in people who have opinions.

"Now with that said, some of them get very tiresome. There are people who are so nutty about being anti-rail you could tell them anything on the planet Earth and you could prove it to them with facts, and they’re not going to listen."

But some criticism also has to do with his style. Some call it a disengaged, hands-off manner that has put the project in jeopardy. Carlisle scoffs at the notion and points out that rail has progressed farther than at any time in the city’s history.

As for those who say he should be more engaged?

"Those people are yesterday’s leaders," he says matter-of-factly. "The new leader has managers who can manage. The new method of leading, I would say across the country, is empowering your employees, inspiring them and giving them enough leeway so that they can flourish.

"Now that doesn’t mean that you don’t give them direction, but your job is the satellite view and then it gets progressively smaller and smaller."

Eric Sacks understood that when he worked for Carlisle at the city prosecutor’s office.

"He trusted the people under him," said Sacks, a former deputy prosecutor who now is a real estate investor. "He wasn’t a micromanager, so he would assign a task and he would be confident that he would pick the right people to manage a task and he let them do it.

"He would let people do their job, and … he also always had a real open-door policy. You could go into his office, talk to him, ask him questions, even bounce case theories off of him. He was very accessible."

Carlisle has carried that management style with him to Honolulu Hale, letting managers manage and overseeing from above.

"They’re very good at it," he says. "They have great knowledge, and they work together with other people in the same circumstances to get a whole lot done."

He also brought along the same fiscal strategy he employed while serving as prosecutor.

Reining in spending and getting the city’s fiscal house "in order" was the primary objective when he took office in September 2010. It’s a message he is always delivering, whether it’s to the public, the City Council or his staff.

"That endeared him to all of us because we get to joke about how frugal he is," Cha Thompson, his campaign chairwoman, says with a laugh. "Yes, be fiscally responsible. We hear that every week from him."

Doing that has meant making some unpopular decisions, notably in the amount of bond funding, or future debt, set aside for road repair and maintenance.

His opponents recognize Carlisle has succeeded in "bending the debt curve," even if they say this is not the time to do it. Carlisle pushes forward, noting that his administration is not only holding the line on future debt, but also increasing payments to fund post-employment benefits for public workers and other unfunded liabilities.

The same could be said of recent bus service cutbacks. Most politicians would see the peril of cutting back bus service in an election year.

"We’re working hard on it," he says. "We’re finding solutions and we’re helping, but frankly, it would’ve been real easy just to let this sort of carry on until after the elections, and that’s not the way to run a government.

"You don’t go into paralysis because it’s campaign season, and that happens a lot. People keep on saying, ‘Oh, I’m gonna make the tough decisions,’ and then they don’t do stuff like that. That’s crazy. It’s a tough decision to be able to cut back on bus service, but it’s economically absolutely essential."

With more work ahead of him, Carlisle says he hopes to get the chance to finish what he started. But even he acknowledges nothing is guaranteed, and this may turn out to be just a two-year stop along his career path.

"I know that I’d rather it not be a two-year thing, but, yeah, I would say I worry about it," he says. "But it doesn’t obsess me.

"Some of the things that I’ve felt were the worst things in the world that could have happened to me ended up opening a door somewhere else. I’ve been lucky that way and I hope that it remains that way, but I am working as hard as I can to make sure I stay in this job, because I genuinely love it."