If I were Jennifer Granholm, I’d crawl under the desk and not
come out for a good, long while. Her performance last night at the
Democratic convention was so bizarre that an amused and bemused
Nolan Finley of The Detroit News
speculated that she was either possessed by the ghost of Joe
Biden — “or maybe she had a squirrel up her pant leg.” Cartoonist
Henry Payne, editor of Michigan View, thought that maybe she was
channeling “Arsenio Hall on crack.” Me? I think she got drunk on
her own clever lines. (Her quip that “Mitt Romney’s cars take the
elevator and workers get the shaft” was admittedly a hoot.)

But even more bizarre than Granholm’s convention appearance was
that she was invited to make one in the first place. She was
arguably the worst governor of her time who, during her eight-year
term, took Michigan’s teetering economy into her firm hands and
gave it a good, hard push off the cliff.

On her watch, the state’s
ranking in per capita GDP plummeted to 41st place from
24^th. Michigan became the only state to suffer a net
out-migration during the past decade, and its credit rating was
repeatedly
downgraded.

But since unemployment is the topic of the day, how was
Granholm’s job-creation record? Worse than Katrina-struck
Louisiana’s. Unemployment jumped from
6.8 percent when she was elected to 14.1 percent at its peak in
2009 – although some believe it reached as high as 15.2 percent.
Consider this (generously inaccurate)
chart from The Daily Caller comparing Michigan’s
unemployment rate with the national average:

Michigan’s unemployment figures would undoubtedly have looked
even worse if its residents hadn’t hit the exit doors. But none of
that prevented Granholm from brazenly writing a grand paean to
herself titled: A Governor’s Story: The Fight for Jobs and
America’s Future.

Granholm, then, has long practice pretending that she has saved
jobs that she has actually killed – which, of course, is precisely
Obama’s campaign theme. Consider his jobs record:

In other words, Granholm understands Obama’s dilemma better than
anyone else on the planet and the kind of political pole dances
that must be performed on convention floors to keep people
distracted.

And the loss of dignity is just a small price to pay for a
future Cabinet position.