Leadership Quote by Roy Barnes

Barnes’s line reads like a handshake rendered as political philosophy: business and government aren’t supposed to glare at each other across the table, they’re supposed to sit on the same side and pick a deal that makes the state “competitive.” Coming from a late-20th/early-21st century Southern Democrat who styled himself as a modernizer, it signals a shift from the old populist suspicion of capital toward a Third Way comfort with markets, incentives, and public-private partnership as default tools of governance.

The intent is calming and transactional. “Common interest” reassures employers that regulation won’t be wielded as punishment and tells voters that growth won’t require surrendering civic control. The phrase “not an adversarial interest” is doing most of the work: it frames conflict itself as the problem. Labor disputes, environmental objections, antitrust concerns, even basic regulatory scrutiny start to look like outdated antagonism rather than legitimate democratic friction.

The subtext, though, is asymmetrical. “Business” is treated as a coherent actor with clear needs; “the state” is treated as a unitary entity whose purpose is to meet them. That elides the fact that the state is also workers, consumers, and communities whose interests can collide with corporate priorities. It’s a line built for chambers of commerce, economic development pitches, and the era’s bipartisan race for jobs via tax incentives and deregulation.

As rhetoric, it’s compact and strategic: it recasts governance from referee to teammate, turning debates over accountability into questions of “cooperation” - and making dissent easier to dismiss as anti-growth.