Politics & Power Quote by Jennifer M. Granholm

Granholm frames industrial policy as a gut-check, not a spreadsheet debate. The double question is a trap in the best political sense: it offers the listener only two identities to choose from - a country with a "backbone", or a country that has gone soft. "Backbone of manufacturing" is doing heavy rhetorical labor. It turns factories from one sector among many into the central skeletal support of national strength, implying that without it the nation slumps into dependency, vulnerability, even humiliation. The phrasing also smuggles in a moral hierarchy: making tangible goods is cast as inherently more serious, more patriotic, than the supposedly weightless work of a service economy.

The subtext is anxiety about decline, and it has a specific American accent: the long aftershock of deindustrialization in the Midwest, the political trauma of towns hollowed out by offshoring, and the strategic fear that supply chains routed through rivals become a national security problem. In the Biden-era context Granholm often occupies - energy transition, reshoring, semiconductor competition, EVs - the question isn’t only "jobs", it’s "control". Who builds the batteries, the chips, the grid components? Who gets the know-how?

It’s also a quietly persuasive reframing of climate and tech policy. Instead of asking people to sacrifice for decarbonization, she pitches a story of productive renewal: we can modernize and still build. The urgency comes from making industrial capacity feel existential, not optional.