Creativity Quote by Mike Curb

There is a particular kind of swagger in this line: the promise that government can be rebooted as a turnaround project, led by someone who knows how to flip a bad quarter into a good one. Coming from Mike Curb, a musician who also built a major music-industry brand and later served as California’s lieutenant governor, the appeal is less technocratic than experiential. He’s selling a temperament, not a policy: decisiveness, optimism, deal-making, the “we can fix it” muscle memory of commercial life.

The subtext is that politics is failing because it’s run by the wrong skill set. “Strong businessperson” isn’t just about competence; it’s code for impatience with bureaucracy and a preference for clear winners and losers. “Turning negatives into positives” frames the state as an enterprise whose problems are solvable through managerial grit rather than ideological bargaining. That’s a comforting story for voters tired of gridlock: if the system is broken, hire the kind of person who repairs systems.

The sleight of hand is in the metaphor. In business, negatives and positives are often defined by profit and loss, and the “turnaround” can involve layoffs, consolidation, or sacrificing long-term resilience for short-term performance. In a state, the “negatives” are people’s lives, and the “positives” are contested: economic growth for whom, public safety at what cost, balanced budgets versus public investment. Curb’s phrasing works because it’s aspirational and portable, letting listeners project their own anxieties onto “negatives” and their own hopes onto “positives” without naming the trade-offs.