Leadership Quote by Jennifer Granholm

California gets the postcard; Michigan gets the home address. Jennifer Granholm is doing something canny here: praising the glamour state just enough to disarm Californians while re-centering value on the place she’s politically invested in defending. The line flatters California’s surface appeal, then pivots to a sharper claim about belonging. “Beautiful to look at” frames California as scenery, a consumption experience. “Be a part of it” recasts Michigan as participatory: not just where you live, but where you’re needed.

The subtext is economic as much as emotional. Granholm governed Michigan through the long hangover of deindustrialization and the 2008 crash, when the state was a punchline about flight and failure. Against that backdrop, the quote functions as a counter-ad to the migration mythology that treats California as the endpoint of ambition. She’s arguing that a place can be “less sexy” and still more humane: cheaper, more permeable, less status-gated. California, in this telling, is a high-gloss club with velvet ropes; Michigan is a community where your presence changes the room.

It also works as political rhetoric because it doesn’t pretend Michigan is perfect. It concedes the obvious (California’s beauty) and then claims the less visible advantage: social texture. That’s a Midwestern pitch with teeth, turning regional inferiority into moral leverage. It says: you can admire a brand, but you can join a project.