Leadership Quote by Ed Rendell

The line wants to smell like sweat. "Working our tail off" is deliberately unpolished, a blue-collar idiom that drags politics out of committee rooms and into the break room. Rendell is doing what seasoned operators do when policy details are either too messy or too contested: he shifts the evaluation metric from outcomes to effort, from ideological purity to grind. In a media environment that punishes nuance, diligence becomes a surrogate for virtue.

The second half, "lead by that example", is where the real maneuver happens. Rendell isn’t just praising work; he’s claiming moral authority to ask for more from everyone else. The subtext reads: if you disagree with us, you’re not just wrong, you’re not carrying your weight. It also preemptively answers a common criticism of government and party leadership: that they’re detached, cushioned, performative. By foregrounding exertion, he tries to inoculate against accusations of incompetence or self-dealing. Effort is the shield.

The phrasing is slightly off-kilter (the grammar wobbles), and that helps. It signals spontaneity, not scripting, which is its own form of credibility in American politics. Contextually, Rendell's era of Democratic governance in Pennsylvania leaned hard on competence and dealmaking; this is the rhetorical cousin of that brand. It’s less "trust our plan" than "trust our work ethic" - a pitch aimed at persuading skeptics who don’t love your politics but might respect your hustle.