Leadership Quote by Ed Rendell

A politician doesn’t cite employment statistics to admire beaches; he does it to win an argument before the argument even begins. Ed Rendell’s line is built for a budget hearing, a press scrum, or a ribbon-cutting where “tourism” might otherwise sound like fluff. By grounding it in payrolls, he recasts leisure as infrastructure. Tourism stops being a nice-to-have and becomes a jobs program with souvenir shops.

The phrasing does quiet rhetorical work. “Second biggest” is a ranking move: it signals urgency without needing a dollar figure, and it implies that anyone who dismisses tourism is dismissing the livelihoods of a huge swath of voters. “In terms of the people it employs” is the tell. Rendell isn’t boasting about productivity or innovation; he’s choosing the most politically sympathetic metric. Jobs are tangible, local, and emotionally legible. Employment lets him fold hotel housekeepers, restaurant servers, tour guides, and airport workers into one moral constituency: ordinary people who need the state to take their industry seriously.

The subtext is also defensive. Tourism can be seasonal, low-wage, and vulnerable to shocks, which makes it easy to undervalue in policy conversations obsessed with “real” industries like manufacturing. Rendell’s sentence anticipates that snobbery and counters it with democratic arithmetic: even if you sneer at the sector, you can’t sneer at the number of families depending on it.

Contextually, it fits a governor’s playbook: justify marketing campaigns, convention-center expansions, transit upgrades, and preservation projects as economic development. The line is less about travel than about permission structures for spending.