Leadership Quote by Gray Davis

Bureaucratic fog can be a form of self-defense, and Gray Davis is practically weaponizing it here. The line reads like someone testifying under bright lights while trying not to trip any wires: everything is passive, conditional, and carefully un-owning. "Duke came to us". "They volunteered". Not we sought them out; not we invited the contact. The subject does the acting, the administration merely receives. Davis is building a firewall out of syntax.

Then comes the strategic vagueness: "made a number of suggestions". Suggestions about what? To whom? The missing nouns do the real work, leaving the listener to assume the least damaging version. Even the admission of interaction is fuzzed up. He reaches for a label - "I don't know how I would characterize them" - and then refuses to supply it. That moment matters: characterization is accountability. If you name the thing, you can be asked why it happened, who approved it, what rules apply. So he keeps it in the limbo of "some discussions."

The context practically announces itself: a controversy involving an outside institution (Duke) and the governor's office, where the central question is influence. Was Duke lobbying? Consulting? angling for state decisions? Davis's phrasing tries to split the difference between denial and concession: yes, contact occurred; no, it can't be pinned down as anything formal, decisive, or improper. It's political triage - concede the minimum, concede it slowly, and let the lack of specifics drain the story of oxygen.