Leadership Quote by Mike Rounds

Rounds is doing the politician’s tightrope walk: acknowledge the national addiction to conflict while insisting his home turf is sturdier than the headlines. The line is built on a clean binary - “divided” versus “united” - and then a clever assignment of incentives. Division, he suggests, isn’t the dominant reality; it’s the dominant product. “Creates news” is a quiet accusation aimed at media logic: outrage is clickable, consensus is boring. By naming that mechanism, he positions himself as the adult in the room, someone who sees past the noise.

The subtext is strategic. South Dakota is a small-state brand built on neighborliness, pragmatism, and a kind of civic self-image that resents being lumped into coastal culture-war theater. Rounds flatters constituents by portraying unity as their default setting, while implicitly asking them to treat polarization as something imported or amplified rather than homegrown. That matters for a politician whose job is to keep a coalition intact: farmers, energy interests, tribal communities, small-town conservatives, a thinner slice of Democrats. “United” becomes a claim of competence: we can still govern here.

The phrasing also launders conflict into progress. If unity is what “moves us forward,” then dissent starts to look like mere spectacle - a nuisance rather than a legitimate pushback. It’s an optimistic message with a subtle power move: it defines “forward” as the direction his consensus is already traveling, and frames critics as feeding the news cycle instead of the future.