Leadership Quote by George Pataki

Power in a single sentence, smuggled through the bland language of a progress report. Pataki isn’t just sharing an update; he’s performing competence. “We have been actively trying” is classic political verb-padding: it implies hustle without promising results, inoculates against failure (“trying” is not “winning”), and signals to donors, developers, and voters that the machinery of government is in motion.

The real payload is the “we.” It folds the speaker, the state, the city, the business community, and a whole PR ecosystem into one seamless actor. That grammatical move matters because Olympic bids are never merely about sport. They’re about permission: permission to reimagine land use, accelerate construction timelines, shift public money toward infrastructure that looks like civic investment but often functions as subsidy. By presenting the bid as a collective project, Pataki preemptively frames dissent as being against New York itself.

Then there’s “host.” It’s hospitality rhetoric with an edge: New York as global stage manager, not just participant. In the post-9/11 era, when the city’s identity was being actively rebuilt in narrative as well as steel, the Olympics promised a clean, televised storyline of resilience and centrality. Pataki’s line taps that longing while staying safely bureaucratic.

The context is also a quiet admission of competition and fragility. Cities don’t “actively try” unless the prize is uncertain and the costs politically combustible. The sentence works because it sounds modest, but it’s actually a sales pitch for ambition with plausible deniability.