Politics & Power Quote by Mark Cuban

Cuban’s disgust isn’t just aesthetic; it’s brand management with a civic edge. “Slimy” is a word from the marketplace, not the seminar room: it frames politics as a rigged sales pitch where the product is you. Coming from a businessman who’s built a persona on blunt transparency and competitive hustle, the line positions him as the guy who refuses to grovel. The subtext is: I understand incentives, and the incentives in electoral politics reward dishonesty.

His real target is the conversion of disagreement into identity warfare. “If you’re not on my side, you’re the enemy” sketches a culture where politics behaves like sports fandom without the harmlessness. He’s diagnosing a zero-sum moral economy: the other team isn’t wrong, it’s illegitimate. That phrasing matters because it reframes partisanship as a social technology, not just an ideological divide. It hints that polarization is profitable for someone - media, consultants, parties - even if it’s corrosive for voters.

The third-party talk does two things at once. It’s a genuine craving for optionality (a classic entrepreneur’s instinct) and a subtle rebuke of the duopoly as a closed market. Name-dropping Unity08, a mid-2000s attempt to engineer a centrist “unity” ticket, places the quote in an era when Iraq fatigue, culture-war escalation, and cable-news outrage were hardening into the permanent campaign. Cuban isn’t offering a policy program; he’s offering a consumer complaint: the two dominant products are broken, so build competition. The appeal is its plainspoken impatience - and the tell is the faith that politics can be fixed by adding choice, as if voters were just waiting for a better menu.