Politics & Power Quote by Roy Barnes

Government works best when it assumes it is being watched. Roy Barnes frames scrutiny not as a nuisance but as the default setting of a healthy democracy, and the phrasing matters: "should ever think" targets a mindset, not a single bad act. The warning is psychological. The real danger isn’t only corruption; it’s complacency - the quiet drift into believing the public is distracted, powerless, or too overwhelmed to notice.

The subtext is a rebuke to the insider culture that treats public service as private territory. Barnes chooses "citizens they work for", a simple employer-employee inversion that strips officeholders of grandeur. It’s not just accountability theater; it’s a reminder that legitimacy is rented, not owned. Even "can't or won't" is doing work: it anticipates both structural barriers to oversight (complex bureaucracy, opaque processes) and emotional ones (cynicism, fatigue). Barnes is insisting that neither should be counted on as political cover.

Contextually, Barnes comes from a late-20th-century Southern political landscape where reform rhetoric often had to coexist with entrenched networks of influence. The line fits an era of rising transparency demands - open records fights, ethics rules, watchdog media, and later the internet-fueled expectation that receipts are always available. Read now, it lands as both principled and tactical: in a world of cameras, leaks, and searchable archives, assuming invisibility isn’t just immoral, it’s incompetent. The quote doubles as governance advice and a deterrent: act like scrutiny is guaranteed, because eventually it is.