Leadership Quote by Roy Barnes

Barnes is doing a politician’s tightrope act: blessing profit without sounding like he’s kneeling at the altar of corporations. The line is almost comically redundant - “prosper,” “make a profit,” “expansion,” “prosperity” - and that repetition is the point. It’s a verbal moat. By stacking synonyms, he avoids specifying whose prosperity he means, which industries get favored, or what tradeoffs come with “business expansion.” The sentence is a handshake offered to donors, chambers of commerce, and suburban swing voters all at once, with no fingerprints left behind.

The specific intent is reassurance. Barnes wants to signal he’s safe for capital, pro-growth, and temperamentally aligned with the late-20th-century Democratic pivot toward business-friendly governance in the South. Coming from a Georgia politician of his era, it lands in the long shadow of “New South” branding: modernize the economy, recruit employers, talk jobs, keep the culture-war noise offstage. It’s the language of ribbon cuttings and site-selection pitches, where optimism substitutes for policy.

The subtext is where the politics live. “Profit caused by… expansion” frames profit as an outcome of growth rather than, say, wage suppression, deregulation, or public subsidy. It sanitizes the mechanism. It also quietly proposes a hierarchy: if business thrives, everyone else will follow. That’s not argued; it’s assumed. The vagueness isn’t a flaw - it’s a coalition strategy, one that turns “prosperity” into a mood rather than a measurable promise.