Politics & Power Quote by Roy Barnes

It lands like a clean-handed warning, but the real move is to smear everyone just enough to make the speaker sound like the adult in the room. Roy Barnes’s line tries to puncture the comforting myth that polarization is a one-sided disease. “Neither” is the key word: it preempts the audience’s instinct to pick a villain and replaces it with a shared indictment. That’s not moral relativism so much as political positioning. When a politician insists both parties are “not clean,” he’s also laundering his own credibility, offering himself as the credible witness to everyone else’s corruption.

The phrase “tactics that divide our people” is deliberately clinical. Barnes doesn’t name the tactics - race-baiting, fear ads, gerrymandering, algorithm-friendly outrage, primary challenges that reward extremity - because naming forces you to take sides and cite receipts. “Tactics” keeps it procedural, like the problem is campaign strategy rather than power or policy. “Our people” invokes civic ownership, a soft nationalism that makes division feel like vandalism, not simply disagreement.

Context matters: Barnes is a Southern Democrat who governed in Georgia and later watched the state (and the region) harden into hyper-partisan terrain. He’s speaking from a place where “unity” has been marketed as virtue while fierce fights over race, voting rules, and identity politics have driven realignment for decades. The intent is to call out polarization without alienating either camp - a classic centrist appeal that doubles as an argument for moderation, institutionalism, and, implicitly, candidates like him.