Shikha Dalmia calls what former Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm did in front of God and everybody at the Democrat National Convention a "political pole dance", for Reason.com here:
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 24th. 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.
Granholm has never looked more marvelous, but pace Dalmia, Granholm's appearance wasn't bizarre.
There has been much commentary saying as much, as if Granholm's performance was like some sort of meltdown, something almost crazy and beyond the realm of understanding, not unlike Howard Dean's a few years ago.
But from the point of view of ideology her selection and presentation made perfect sense. Like the true believer of a religion, Granholm's emotional display was characteristic but superfluous. It was the content of her remarks which were significant because they were entirely in keeping with the blindness of the ideological mindset of the new old liberalism which calls failure success. Indeed, today's liberalism thrives on failure in order to succeed, and the more failure it has the more success it has. The rightness and success of the bailout of GM, the substance of Granholm's paean to Obama, isn't a bug of this new old ideology, it's a feature. Obama himself has said so. And he's now on a mission to spread the government control of business around, not just the wealth:
“I said, I believe in American workers, I believe in this American industry, and now the American auto industry has come roaring back,” he said. “Now I want to do the same thing with manufacturing jobs, not just in the auto industry, but in every industry.
Therefore consider Jennifer Granholm as the prophet of the new religion, and indeed its forerunner.
Like Michigan's devastated GDP under Granholm, America under Obama has settled into dramatically lower GDP compared to the post-war average. It has descended to almost European proportions, which evidently was the whole point of Obama's 2009 European apology tour. It was as if he were announcing that under his leadership America was going to stop being the leader of the free world and become just like them, anemic and dependent social welfare states. At 1.7 percent currently, GDP in America has indeed been cut down to size, to less than half of the decades-long average of 3.5 percent. Meanwhile nearly one in six Americans are classified as poor, and almost half of all households receive some form of direct government assistance. Is it any wonder Europe wants Obama reelected?
Like Michigan's exodus not just of population but of businesses fleeing the dreaded "single business tax" under Granholm, the nation's only value-added tax, for the first time in living memory there has been a sudden appearance of wealthy "global" Americans actually renouncing citizenship to escape the growing worldwide reach of the Internal Revenue Service's Gestapo-like intimidation of foreign financial institutions, which no longer want the trouble of doing business with Americans. Talk of finding and going to a "back-up country" among the smart set is an alarming sign that the kind of people we need to attract the most in order to grow our economy are instead repelled by the political class' increasing repression of capital and its hatred of the rich.
Like Michigan's downgraded credit rating, America under Obama lost its gold-standard AAA rating, formerly probably the single most recognizable synonym for the country's reputation in the world as the one most likely to pay its bills.
And like Michigan's long period of unemployment under Granholm, America's 43 consecutive months of unemployment at 8.1 percent or higher under Obama speak for themselves.
One might even say that Jennifer Granholm in her eerie way prepared the way for the coming of the (slum) lord. It's only fitting that she should announce his second coming.
All of this failure is success because it keeps Democrats in power. That's why Gov. Jennifer Granholm's appearance wasn't bizarre. Her governorship epitomized the failure of America under Obama.
And so the ideologues do rejoice, because it's all intended. Forward, to state-capitalism.
